OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-19/onlyfans-to-block-sexually-explicit-videos-starting-in-october

by minimaxir • 5 years ago

1147 1309 5 years ago

The sub-headline is more interesting:

"The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, starting in October. Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy"

thrower123• 5 years ago

It sounds like they're trying to thread the needle and be Instagram with titties, or take up the tasteful softcore torch that Playboy used to carry.

throwaway3067445• 5 years ago

Tasteful softcore like the programmer's test image? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

If the issue is coming from banks and payment processors, why doesn't Patreon have this same kind of problem? They both fill the same niche, right?

Edit: Apparently the same thing happened to them too. Thank you to the person who linked the other discussion below.

jerf3• 5 years ago

They do have this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17432801

Zababa• 5 years ago

Interesting. Does this means that there is a business to make companies like OnlyFan and Patreon for adult content and then dropping it once you get big, and start again?

some_person• 5 years ago

I wonder if that answers this question from 11 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291790

cblconfederate8• 5 years ago

What is it called when your greed for investor money ends up giving a giant opening for your competitor and destroying your business? Also how come even the most profitable company can't compete with deep SV pockets? Is this capitalism?

rchaud6• 5 years ago

It is, but it's not a very good one. Think about the billions that have gone into reinventing the taxi industry, the hotel industry and the food delivery industry. We don't call it 'picking winners' however, because it's not the filthy public sector doing it. And also because none of Uber, Airbnb or DoorDash can really be considered a 'win'.

State-backed capitalism has its faults, but they usually try to move billions into a strategically important area that benefits a large enough section of the economy.

cwkoss• 5 years ago

I think "The Vine Effect" would be apt

alpaca1283• 5 years ago

Maybe it's not investor money but issues with payment processors. Credit card companies don't like porn for some reason, and they're in a position where they can enforce such limits on many platforms.

jerf3• 5 years ago

So, serious question because I know very little about OnlyFans other than the general knowledge flowing around the internet: What does this leave of the site? Because my impression was certainly that this was the purpose of the site.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

I assume they will end up like Tumblr after it went Safe for Work. Still around but nowhere near as popular and a shell of its former self.

alpaca1283• 5 years ago

Not necessarily. Discord is a pretty popular platform for exclusive access to selected people, e.g. Patreon supporters. As long as OF allows this kind of link it might stay relevant.

darth_avocado• 5 years ago

Tumblr is exactly what I had in mind. It will be a much less popular place with other copycats just taking over on that business model.

rhino369• 5 years ago

Maybe I’m out of the loop, but at least Tumblr had recognized non-porn uses.

If someone linked me their OnlyFans, I would assume it’s porn.

How do they seriously expect people to use it when the brand is porn?

georgefrick• 5 years ago

Fairly good explanation of it being about far more than nudity. They have created a casino like experience for emotional interaction.

https://youtu.be/ji5qepCx-8s

jerf3• 5 years ago

Thank you, that's a perfect example of the sort of thing I was fishing for with my question.

crackercrews• 5 years ago

Very helpful video. Also mentions their sister site myfreecams. That's probably where the x-rated videos will remain. Seems like they're splitting the brand to have one NSFW and one SFW.

Sebb7679• 5 years ago

I'd like to note, though, that this video also treats OnlyFans as a porn-only site. It literally starts with asking "Why do people spend money on OnlyFans?" when what they're asking is "why do people spend money on porn".

CommieBobDole2• 5 years ago

That's my question, too - I thought OnlyFans was a hosting platform for personal porn sites; I remember there was a big uproar a few months back when some TikTok influencer joined the site and started posting non-adult content. People were upset that they were diluting a site that's specifically for adult content.

Causality1• 5 years ago

Not quite accurate. Bella Thorne joined Onlyfans and promised "no clothes naked" content in exchange for her $200 subscription fee. She made millions of dollars but then only sent clothed and obscured pictures to her subscribers. After thousands of people demanded refunds, Onlyfans changed their policies to heavily limit how much subscribers could be charged for content, how much they could pay, and increased the creator payout wait time from one week to three weeks. This heavily damaged the incomes of thousands of people overnight.

benbristow• 5 years ago

Linus Media Group (Linus Tech Tips) started an OnlyFans parody-style account for April Fool's this year

https://onlyfans.com/reallinustechtips

Ended up being one of the top accounts on the platform for a while.

sirmoveon• 5 years ago

I think the initial purpose was similar to Patreon: allowing creators a way to monetize. It just became famous due to the pornographic content.

jazzyjackson4• 5 years ago

To be more specific, it was a direct competitor to Patreon, but patreon banned porn and onlyfans didn’t, thus the market differentiation.

ArcticHusky2• 5 years ago

On ThePornDude, there is a section called "free OnlyFans leaks sites", which is an excellent example of actual content.

kennywinker• 5 years ago

Stealing content from self-employed creators is pretty low. There is plenty of free porn on the internet that doesn't involve theft.

carabiner• 5 years ago

There's cooking videos, yoga, gardening and other benign stuff on OF, believe it or not.

da_big_ghey4• 5 years ago

Yes but if somebody says "drop your OF" is not talking about gardening. Mostly it is known for sexual material.

nickthegreek4• 5 years ago

Pretty sure that content is not what is bringing in the monies.

rchaud6• 5 years ago

Why not just feature that stuff on the homepage? Most adult-oriented channels are run solo, so they're distributing links via social channels.

Same as Twitter. It's awash in porn but you wouldn't really know it if you stuck to the default trends and searches.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 5 years ago

I watch several channels on YT, and I think they have excellent value (educational like 3Blue1Brown, entertaining like Davie504, musical like Ichika Nito and so on). I really enjoy watching/listening to them especially when I do something around the house like cleaning. But the moment they said they go OnlyFans and I have to pay $10 in order to watch them, I can't imagine I'd switch.

monocasa4• 5 years ago

There's benign stuff on PornHub too, but I don't think they'd be able to survive without their adult content either.

tomjen34• 5 years ago

InRange moved to pornhub when they were banned from Youtube. While cute and all, that made 0% revenue for them.

city41• 5 years ago

The article says

Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy, the company said Thursday.

So I am guessing the distinction is nudes vs sex acts?

bcheung11• 5 years ago

...for how long? There were rumors they were getting rid of adult and then they put out an announcement saying that they would always be inclusive of sex workers. Then they just announced this.

Their credibility is gone.

rainsil• 5 years ago

The nudity exception is probably more along the lines of the usual carve-outs for 'scientific, educational, or artistic' content.

jamal-kumar• 5 years ago

It's gotten taken over by celebrities. They don't promote content from girls selling their nudes anymore.

Even dead ones get it better. I took one look at it recently and saw lil peep on there. My first thought was wow they're really putting a dead rapper's meat out there like that? But nah, it's like unreleased music videos and shit. Gotta wonder who is milking that.

selimthegrim3• 5 years ago

Rachel Dolezal joining was probably the shark-jumping in this trend.

wtf_is_up• 5 years ago

It's a huge win for PornHub which already has a robust amateur porn monetation platform. I suspect most explicit OF users already use PH for teasers and free content. Most likely they will move all content to PH and leave OF behind

techdragon2• 5 years ago

Had. PornHub are still blocked by MasterCard, Visa and Discover and since American Express was never an option, that’s a lock, no credits cards for PornHub.

barbazoo2• 5 years ago

Fourth paragraph

That popularity also brought with it additional scrutiny, and OnlyFans is positioning itself more as a forum for musicians, fitness instructors and chefs than sex workers. While many of its most-popular creators post videos of themselves engaging in sexual behavior, several mainstream celebrities like Bella Thorne, Cardi B and Tyga have also set up accounts.

skinnymuch5• 5 years ago

Bella Thorne was only there for explicit stuff.

Not sure about the other celebs.

spoonjim• 5 years ago

Think “show your titties,” not “suck a dick.”

tofuahdude4• 5 years ago

Man, I would hate to be the judge of "nude but not sexually explicit" content

biesnecker• 5 years ago

Are there any major non-porn OnlyFans creators? I’ve never seen it referenced outside of adult content.

0xcde4c3db• 5 years ago

I don't know where to find a trustworthy list, but I've read that several of the biggest ones are fitness influencers and personal trainers who do preview videos on Instagram/YouTube/Twitch and use OnlyFans to post the full routine/program and provide individual consultation. Granted, there's not exactly a bright line between fitness content and softcore porn, but they're typically not put in the same category for administrative/policy purposes.

jcun41283• 5 years ago

Crypto payments maybe? As a medium before it's sold back to USD/regular fiat.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

I'm a cryptocurrency advocate, but for the average person transacting with crypto is still insanely intimidating and a pain to set up properly. Maybe paying with stablecoins could work but that is still a lot to ask of your users who are accustomed to paying for things with a credit card.

Want to buy something? Open a Coinbase or Gemini account, hook up ACH or wire transfers, wait a week for the deposit to be made, then send 'dollars' to this really long and complicated looking address. If you send it to the wrong address you are SOL.

jcun41283• 5 years ago

Yeah I'm saying you'd have a service that does that for you, moves the money from credit (OF sub) to crypto back to fiat for the user (OF creator). I also realize about costs too... but like with CBP if you transact a lot of volume the fees go down so you could build it up.

Well... I guess ultimately you still need that thing between the credit card and the service eg. stripe... idk if the porn thing is like a blanket protection against CP or something?

bcheung11• 5 years ago

Crypto payments hasn't taken off yet. It's beyond the scope of most people's ability to pay in crypto.

To reach the masses you probably have to go with "know your customer" (KYC) requirements that are going to scare lots of people away when they have to upload photos of their passport and stuff like that to a website.

And governments and banks are going to impose the same restrictions somehow.

Unless they use a coin that is private, all transactions are going to be recorded in the blockchain and publicly viewable to everyone. Nobody wants their porn purchases to be public knowledge.

It will probably eventually get there but probably at least 5 years out.

jcun41283• 5 years ago

Nobody wants their porn purchases to be public knowledge.

I'm curious about that, I agree that you can trace transactions of a wallet, but can you figure out who a wallet belongs to?

paulgb2• 5 years ago

Ostensibly, payment providers block this type of thing because it has higher fraud risk, but this makes me wonder: do countries where credit is less fundamental to payments have the same problem? My understanding is that in the UK, for example, you could make a deposit to a betting site with the same payment card you use to buy milk, since it's more secure than a credit card and the counterparty assumes less risk.

cblconfederate8• 5 years ago

That should be a myth by now. Would be interesting if e.g. Stripe could share the fraud statistics for onlyfans. The banks probably do this purely to keep up appearances and avoid potential bad PR.

CheezeIt• 5 years ago

This was targeted illegally by the administration under Operation Choke Point, and I would hazard to guess something similar is happening again now.

imglorp• 5 years ago

I don't understand who appointed the banks became the keepers of puritanical propriety. They're terrified someone might see a boob or buy some weed, and the weight of the world rests on the banks to prevent that from happening.

ryandvm• 5 years ago

It's probably not fraud so much as it is chargebacks from guys whose wives are asking "wtf is this OnlyFans charge?!?"

"Ah shit, honey. Somebody must have stolen my card."

selectodude• 5 years ago

Here in the United States I use the same debit card for sports betting and groceries.

fleddr• 5 years ago

Same here in the Netherlands, we pay with a debit card. In stores as well as online.

May people do have one (55%) as it sometimes comes with a payment package, but they are generally frowned upon as tech from the stone age and insecure.

tomc19852• 5 years ago

So long, OnlyFans. You started a golden age just as quickly as you ended it.

mschuster91• 5 years ago

Good luck surviving that exodus. Dropping porn killed Tumblr, Onlyfans doesn't have anything that makes it stand apart from competition like Patreon.

For sex workers, there is ManyVids that will eat their lunch.

Only benefit out of this, maybe nsfw Reddit will be worth a visit again when most of the OF ~~spammers~~sellers have gone.

nickthegreek4• 5 years ago

The ability to tip and unlock content in DMs as well as tip on posts makes OF different from patreon. Tips bring in ALOT of money to popular creators, way more than the monthly subscription.

gpapilion• 5 years ago

I've seen them brag about revenue, and it looks amazing. That said the porn industry if filled with liars, and I don't believe anything w/o and audited results.

Ajay-p• 5 years ago

That is a lot of people who are suddenly going to need to find work...but I think a lot of the sexually themed OF's will migrate to other cam websites. I wonder how much money OF will lose because of this decision?

_nothing• 5 years ago

This question isn't necessarily directed to you but your comment made me wonder: How do other cam sites handle payments and what makes them different than OF?

fragmede5• 5 years ago

They use payment processors that specialize in adult content - who charge exorbitant fees for the privilege. Adult payment processors charge 15-20% vs the 2.9%+30¢ Stripe charges, and is nowhere near as nice to use.

scelerat• 5 years ago

Patreon made similar decisions about four years ago when they began to tighten their terms for NSFW creators.

https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-27-patreon-adult-content-cr...

Much of the pressure came from payment processing partners and banks, much like is described in this article.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbqwwj/patreon-suspension-of...

It seems like for any crowdsourced funding platform there is a volume cap for NSFW content imposed by the need of those platforms to seek wider audiences and funding sources.

vwoolf• 5 years ago

I assume this will lead to Onlyfans's effective death, much as Tumblr's porn ban seems to have led to, or hastened, its death.

Reddit seems to have resisted whatever calls it must be getting to eliminate porn. So far at least. It will ban or quarantine some heretical ideas, but porn is still there.

alpaca1283• 5 years ago

Reddit doesn't let people pay directly for content. You can gift awards but those aren't really worth anything.

fragmede5• 5 years ago

Reddit's gone to lengths to hide it, so casual users aren't hitting it by accident two clicks off an unrelated Google search result page, not on "/r/all", which gets advertisers what they want, without the uproar that banning porn would cause.

falcolas• 5 years ago

Reddit seems to have resisted whatever calls it must be getting to eliminate porn

Not entirely. They purged all NSFW subreddits from the r/all and r/popular meta subreddits. They also go on a purging binge whenever a remotely taboo subreddit makes the news.

rchaud6• 5 years ago

Somehow they manage to get away with DMCA violations however. Lots of 'reaction' channels (where people watch along with a TV show or Youtube clip) now only post heavily truncated preview videos on Youtube. The full videos, which include the copyrighted content, sits on Patreon.

fragmede5• 5 years ago

It's a dollar cap - process enough dollars per month or per year, and Visa/Mastercard takes notice (as mentioned by Vice). For all the furor, taking payment via crypto's not viable outside of specific niches. Or rather, OnlyFans did the X vs Y of kick x-rated content off the platform vs get kicked off Visa/Mastercard's "platform", and is going with option 1.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 5 years ago

So basically this just begs for the owners to create two clearly differentiated brands: (1) the current one will probably die like Tumblr but they have some high-profile non-porn creators so I think they will keep going for a while, (2) the second one geared towards porn mainly and accepting alternative payment methods like Webmoney, Paysafecard and others. They can start accepting credit cards and Paypal initially to gain users, and when the pressure builds up, drop the banks and hope that the users are so attached to their content they'll use the alternative methods.

claudiawerner2• 5 years ago

Patreon went one step further - if you post content against Patreon's rules anywhere else, even if you don't link to it, if Patreon finds out, they'll ask you to stop doing it, and threaten to suspend your account if you keep doing it.

This is why many people who post fetish-y art (even stuff like mind-control kink) moved from Patreon to SubscribeStar. Even erotic roleplay site F-List moved to SubscribeStar.

CamperBob23• 5 years ago

That sounds outrageous. Is there a link to more info about this policy?

CryptoBanker• 5 years ago

Goodbye OnlyFans

mgarfias• 5 years ago

RIP: their biz model

gonehome• 5 years ago

There's clearly some sort of opportunity here for an Audius like decentralized application/protocol (with the UI figured out), or just applications on Urbit when that stack is ready enough.

Centralized services like this will always fail eventually. We need better models than our current megacorp/client stack and the incentives that creates for most services.

In this case though it may be a factor of liability changes on high risk content: https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-controversial-new-sex-traf...

It's not so much the tech companies and payment processors that are making policy, but a reaction from them to changes in government policy that increases their exposure.

GDC72• 5 years ago

Why can't these websites simply find other banks to do business with?

I mean also overseas, for sure the extra costs (if any) are better than basically killing the golden goose.

The odds of Onlyfans becoming the huge phenomenon that it is were so slim, it seems like a waste of luck to just throw it all away because of banking problems.

monocasa4• 5 years ago

Because it's Visa and Mastercard saying no, not the banks.

GDC72• 5 years ago

Do people chargeback the 50$ they spend on OnlyFans?

Besides PR in the age of revenge porn, what's the technical or legal element which changed compared to 2019?

Can't be social because if anything society is in love with porn.

bcheung11• 5 years ago

Visa and Mastercard allow adult. They just force you to pay the "high-risk" category. Which is much higher fees. OF can't get away with only charging models 20% if credit card processing is taking more than half of that.

I suspect they are currently not classified as adult and the banks are saying, look, you are almost entirely adult so you have to pay us more.

Arrath2• 5 years ago

Why hasn't someone started a bank and/or payment processor without these puritanical moral qualms about adult content? Seems like the real golden goose, waiting to be had.

rchaud6• 5 years ago

Because that sounds more like an ideologically-driven venture than something that would be good business.

sysadm1n• 5 years ago

The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, starting in October. Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy, the company said Thursday.

This paragraph contradicts itself:

- The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit

Versus

- Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos

What is this article trying to say?

X6S1x6Okd1st2• 5 years ago

nude is not the same thing as sexually explicit.

CommieBobDole2• 5 years ago

That's true, but I suspect that there's enough of an overlap on a site like OnlyFans that the Venn diagram is basically a circle.

speeder• 5 years ago

Seemly nudity is fine, sex is not.

nickthegreek4• 5 years ago

Looks like OF is saying softcore only and is gonna call anything they don't like explicit based on the whim of the reviewer.

rchaud6• 5 years ago

The Brandi Maxx definition of pornography

antcas• 5 years ago

Isn't their whole business model "explicit"? I don't get how this will work out for them.

Based on the Indie Hackers interview with two active Only Fans content makers, it also sounds like their app is kinda shitty and slow.

Seems like they're opening the door wide open to a new competitor.

Miner49er• 5 years ago

A new competitor will face the exact same problem, unless they try and do something like accepting cryptocurrency.

bruceb2• 5 years ago

The winner here might actually be the majority of NSFW content makers on OF who are mortgaging their future reputations for very small payouts.

(not a judgment on what they do but the reality of the situation)

X6S1x6Okd1st2• 5 years ago

Really weird that they are kicking off a large portion of their user base for inclusive reasons.

TechBro86153• 5 years ago

What an absolutely dumb move. Why not leave the thing on autopilot generating $400m a year, and start a new site for SFW simping?

Saint_Genet• 5 years ago

Remember when yahoo bought Tumblr for 1.1 billion, banned porn and later sold it for 3 million?

justinzollars• 5 years ago

Looks like I had the wrong link on my clipboard. This is what I intended to post: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-19/onlyfans-...

bcheung11• 5 years ago

Were they getting their credit card processing in the non-adult category. I know a bunch of adult credit card processors are in the range of 12-15% and OF only takes 20%. Maybe that is why they are cracking down on them.

There are plenty of porn sites out there operating legally, wonder why the banks are giving them issue.

My guess is that they presented themselves to banks as just ordinary non-adult transactions and now the banks are seeing that they are almost entirely adult so they want to put them into the higher and more expensive "high-risk" category and OF won't be able to get away with only taking 20% from the models.

I guess I'm getting back into the adult website game. I work with tons of adult models as a photographer and got out of making websites due to OnlyFans.

Shalomboy• 5 years ago

I always felt like adult websites were tech unsavvy. Like they usually designed the site with plenty of love and care, but the structures holding that design up felt notably behind-the-times. Got a take on that?

yvdriess• 5 years ago

The cliché is the inverse. Porn is always the first industry in making use of new technologies. VHS, DVD, www, streaming video etc.

pvarangot4• 5 years ago

Their primary payments processor was CCBill, so no, they were using "adult proof" providers. I think there's something going on on the adult payments industry that I don't know about.

Either PornHub/OF got too big even for CCBill's approach to dealing with fraud, or CCBill is pulling the plug on websites that take market away from "traditional porn" probably because of pressure from the later.

kondro3• 5 years ago

Probably more pressure from banks related to payouts, then processing.

Money laundering and tax avoidance is a big deal and if OF isn't going out of their way to make everyone happy then they have a potentially multi-billion dollar a year money laundering business going on.

goldcd• 5 years ago

One of the current owners is the guy behind myfreecams - he knows how to run a porn site (and get cards to work on it).

This split - and it's going to be a split (as they'd be insane to let that much porn money walk) is just to leave behind a nice investable onlyfans to rival patreon.

bregma• 5 years ago

Where are you supposed to go to find interesting images now? Asking for a friend.

LatteLazy3• 5 years ago

Payment processors need to be declared a utility. Any legal business shouldnt have banks playing morality police.

lotsofpulp5• 5 years ago

This supposedly coming soon system should ideally be able to serve as the electronic payment utility.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...

lnjarroyo2• 5 years ago

Curiously similar to "Pix" launched by brazilian central bank about a year ago. A quick Google search will show you dozens and dozens of countries getting instant payment systems promoted by their own central banks during the last years. Really makes you wonder who could be behind such a "coincidence".

LatteLazy3• 5 years ago

One of my personal conspiracy theories is that bitcoin (and Tor) are the reason so many states have legalised weed: you have to permit what you cannot actually police.

Hopefully we'll see the same effect here with bitcoin or a single processor making a killing in the market for "sins"...

ianhawes• 5 years ago

This seems incredibly odd given that OnlyFan's primary payment processor is CCBill, a massive payment processor focused solely on adult content.

Here is opportunity #3928 for Stripe to step in and earn their valuation and flex their payment muscle and allow adult payments.

Mindwipe7• 5 years ago

It's very likely the pressure is coming from Visa and MasterCard (especially MC) rather than at the level of CCbill.

Ansil8494• 5 years ago

How so?

nonameiguess• 5 years ago

This doesn't make any sense at all. Pick a subscription porn site right now, any one, and go try to sign up. You don't have to follow through, just get to the payment page and don't click submit. They all take Visa and MasterCard.

CCbill itself couldn't exist if Visa and MasterCard didn't let it process payments for porn.

NationalPark• 5 years ago

Stripe's hands are tied - they need financial services to operate and banks (and CC processors) are the ones pushing down these puritanical values.

bpicolo3• 5 years ago

Could be wrong, but I think it's less puritanical, and more that transactions with these types of vendors are overwhelmingly fraudulent and charged-back. It's a big liability for the processors.

abvdasker• 5 years ago

Shouldn’t Stripe be big enough at this point to have some leverage as a customer?

fenderbluesjr• 5 years ago

Personally, I would prefer if OnlyFans didn't exist. I think that is a nicer world.

Mindwipe7• 5 years ago

Visa and MasterCard are pretty evil enterprises, and it's fairly inevitable at this point they will either need to be destroyed or regulated.

viggity• 5 years ago

smells like a publicity stunt to me. "omg. wtf, onlyfans, I won't be able to pay my bills" a million sex workers howl into social media. For 2 months. october rolls around, "we've decided to reverse course". So much free publicity.

toyg• 5 years ago

It's a risky game though, because you're opening the space to potential competitors for two months. That's some significant time to achieve network effects, and people who move out are unlikely to ever get back.

findthewords• 5 years ago

No idea how this will play out, but this is very reminiscent of Yahoo and Tumblr: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tumblr-sold-to-wordpress

skrtskrt• 5 years ago

This is going to be corporate suicide on a greater scale than Tumblr's policy.

I say greater because OnlyFans is/was still on a massive upswing whereas Tumblr was 10 years past its peak already when the nails went in the coffin.

Edit: I understand this is supposedly not their choice.

ramesh312• 5 years ago

It's not like they have a choice. Their business was only ever viable at the behest of their payment provider. The reason no one has made an OnlyFans before, and the reason why people have tried and failed, entirely comes down to this.

toomuchtodo6• 5 years ago

Oh god I can’t believe I’m going to say this.

Crypto/Bitcoin, in keeping with the relationship the Internet and adult content have. Congrats Coinbase, Venmo, and others enabling censorship resistant crypto payments on your revenue bump.

x0x0• 5 years ago

Right, but... is that 99% of their content, 99.9%, or 99.99%? Cause I bet it's at least 99%.

gtirloni• 5 years ago

How do sites like Pornhub get paid then? Why can't OnlyFans switch to whatever provider they use?

rich_sasha3• 5 years ago

Nothing particularly noble about porn, but it irks me that payment providers act as unofficial censors of business. Why should legal businesses be denied access to the de facto legal tender of 21st century? And on a whim of unelected CEOs...

thaumasiotes• 5 years ago

The reason no one has made an OnlyFans before

Patreon?

buzzwords2• 5 years ago

That was one first thought too

tootie• 5 years ago

OF is a creator platform at heart and not necessarily tied to sexually explicit content except by reputation. There is a likely a huge non-porn market for helping creators of all types monetize their content. The question will be if they can actually get people to completely change their mind about what the platform is for.

fred_is_fred• 5 years ago

Yes there is a huge market for non-porn and it's all on Patreon.

maccolgan• 5 years ago

For this use case, Patreon & OpenCollective (yes, OpenCollective) is far more established and offers many more features than OF. What's the point in using OF then?

unicornfinder• 5 years ago

I agree that there's a huge non-porn market that's likely largely preferable, but said market is already on Patreon which, I think most people would agree, is overall a better platform to begin with.

peteretep• 5 years ago

Perhaps, but OnlyFans will always be a porn site in consumer imaginations moving forward. Nobody’s going to put their wholesome knitting content on there moving forward

trident5000• 5 years ago

OF is thot central.

sonicggg• 5 years ago

Sounds like a great opportunity for another player to step in and fill the vacuum, given that OnlyFans already proved there's a market for this. Just like Vine vs TikTok.

Also, weird that they would give up an entire market because of prude payment providers. Are these providers from Afghanistan? They should not have that much power over their customers.

Maybe a crypto spin off could work.

jachee3• 5 years ago

Anyone who does will face the same pressure from payout vendors.

No one corporate wants to be actively involved in paying sex workers.

moepstar• 5 years ago

That's already in the works / up and running...

You're looking for cumrocket . io (no, not joking) and their own Token Cumrocket / $Cummies which is on BSC (Binance Smart Chain).

cryptonector3• 5 years ago

I think a lot of governments are starting to decide that social media and porn are a terrible waste of resources. If so, they're not wrong.

cryptonector3• 5 years ago

TFA:

OnlyFans is getting out of the pornography business.

HN:

  s/of the pornography //

frutiger• 5 years ago

TFA:
> OnlyFans is getting out of the pornography business.
HN:
s/of the pornography //.

…is getting out business?

IncRnd• 5 years ago

It would have been better to get a code review or to test before checking-in that incorrect code.

belter5• 5 years ago

This is the least of their problems and I am amazed none of their executives is not yet in jail:

"The children selling explicit videos on OnlyFans"

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57255983

belter5• 5 years ago

From the article...I am also amazed at the downvotes.

======================

Schools have shared anonymous reports of pupils using the site, including a 16-year-old who boasted to her careers adviser about the amount of money she made on the site, and showed off her "exuberant" spending on Instagram.

Underage creators and users of the site include victims of prior sexual abuse and those with mental health issues and suicidal thoughts, according to Childline counsellor notes. UK police forces say children have complained about their images being uploaded to the site without consent, and one 17-year-old reported being blackmailed.

Missing children are appearing in OnlyFans videos, according to a US watchdog, which also says it has received reports of child sexual exploitation.

"It is increasingly clear that OnlyFans is being used by children," says chief constable Simon Bailey, the UK's child protection lead.

"The company is not doing enough to put in place the safeguards that prevent children exploiting the opportunity to generate money, but also for children to be exploited."

In a statement, OnlyFans says it could not respond specifically to the anonymous reports we were told about without the account details.

======================

hackinthebochs6• 5 years ago

No verification will be bulletproof, and persistent people will occasionally get around it. I'm not sure what responsibility OnlyFans has beyond taking reasonable measures to prevent circumventing verification. The article mentions someone using their older sister's license as verification. Presumably they look similar. And that's somehow OnlyFan's fault? There's no reason why the executives would have any sort of personal liability.

The anti-vice authoritarians will always come after any lucrative porn enterprise with these sensationalized stories. I'm surprised there are still people out there that eat it up.

wedn3sday• 5 years ago

How does section 230 not cover this? They're just a platform not a publisher right?

concordDance8• 5 years ago

Honestly I don't see what the problem is with a 17 year old getting some money for posting pics... That's a lot of money they can earn.

Claims about this "damaging" them seem about as speculative as 1960s claims that homosexual behaviour is damaging.

rstuart4133• 5 years ago

Thanks for explaining what this is about. There are lots of sites our there where sex workers ply their trade, and as far as I can tell have been allowed to do so by the payment processors for literally decades. The dozens of caming sites for a start. OnlyFans being banned for it while other sites are doing it far more openly would be bizarre.

However those sites now all have strong 230 compliance regimes, and I gather OnlyFans doesn't. OnlyFans could have implemented something similar. PornHub went down that route when confronted with similar pressure - they got of rid of all video's that went compliant. But OnlyFans.com have chosen not to. I wonder why?

wonderwonder2• 5 years ago

I honestly did not know they did anything besides porn. They have a really bad marketing department as I bet most people only know of them via porn (or I run in a slightly more degenerate circle).

redisman3• 5 years ago

Not at all. If someone told anyone I know they have a onlyfans, I can’t think of anyone who would assume anything other than porn

xdrosenheim• 5 years ago

Is it really their own fault for not doing marketing? They were open to have porn on the platform, and then it just swarmed to them. People did the marketing for them.

nkrisc2• 5 years ago

Is it not a porn site? I thought it was a porn site.

ryantgtg4• 5 years ago

It’s a recent push toward more mainstream performers. For example, there are pro surfers who are popular youtube vloggers (e.g. Nathan Florence) who recently started onlyfans channels. Nathan’s is a fitness training channel. It threw a lot of people off guard. And I strongly suspect that onlyfans paid him to start this channel.

https://onlyfans.com/nathanflorence https://dailycaller.com/2021/06/17/onlyfans-pivot-porn-backi...

wellthisishn• 5 years ago

Actually I'd have to say a good marketing department. I think it was part of a long-term plan to be relevant to broad audiences, and come out through the woodwork already strong.

conductr• 5 years ago

My understanding of it was purely regarding porn. Or, as an open platform focusing on paid user generated content which naturally was a cesspool for porn. Interesting enough, after a debate about would you date a girl who had an OF account, I went decided to visit browse site last week and couldn't find anything other than highly sexually provocative but legit sounding channels. Mostly of the fitness type because yoga pants and other form fitting attire. But, I actually found no porn. I suppose you have to know what to search for, or who you want to follow. I never saw any content because I didn't pay for any.

wrycoder• 5 years ago

Bait and switch.

Even if they lose the bulk of their customers, they will still have a bigger network than if they had started with the same platform, but without the porn.

irrational• 5 years ago

I’m surprised too. It’s like using pornhub to post SFW tech tip videos.

ashtonkem3• 5 years ago

There’s non-porn content on PornHub too, but much like OnlyFans that’s a neat trivia fact and statistically meaningless to their bottom line.

joe_the_user3• 5 years ago

This is going to be corporate suicide on a greater scale than Tumblr's policy.

Just a note that Tumblr's anti-porn policy has been fairly leaky and users basically adapted to it. After a decline, the site now hosts nearly as much porn as previously.

The problem is that onlyfans has a much bigger spotlight on it. So yeah, one wonders how people justify just killing their product.

busymom02• 5 years ago

How did they adapt to it? Asking as someone who didn't know Tumblr was still around.

hellotomyrars2• 5 years ago

Even still they went from selling for a billion to being sold for three million. Maybe not entirely fair to blame it purely on the anti-porn push, as the general trends of social media platforms isn’t particularly kind to most companies, but it sure didn’t help.

But agreed that I didn’t know OnlyFans had any meaningful non-porn content. And the business sense in this seems 100% geared towards a short term payout with no regard for what happens afterward.

dvt2• 5 years ago

This is going to be corporate suicide on a greater scale than Tumblr's policy.

Strong disagree. They lined their coffers and now it's time to pivot. In fact, it's probably the perfect time to pivot. They are still relatively unknown, and their reputation hasn't been tarnished. Patreon is ripe for disruption.

Pornography is not how you become a billion-dollar unicorn, which is I'm sure what they're eyeing (especially after their most recent raise).

TrackerFF• 5 years ago

I don't know - OF has one type of users, Patreon has another type of users. OF would need to completely re-brand themselves, name change and all - because seriously, what non-adult (or those very close to adult content) content-creators would use OF as a platform for their work?

Onlyfans is synonymous with camgirls and porn

Sebb7679• 5 years ago

They are still relatively unknown, and their reputation hasn't been tarnished.

Are you sure about that? This company seems pretty well known in the creator space, but not for hosting anything other than porn. At least in all communities I follow, having an OnlyFans account is synonymous with selling porn.

Pornography is not how you become a billion-dollar unicorn

Pornhub would like to have a word with you. I'd say that, in fact, porn is one of the easiest ways to get there (as shown, for example, by OFs enormous growth).

ljm• 5 years ago

If a top-notch sushi chef puts OnlyFans on their business card, I'm not going to expect them to be preparing fish on their page. They would be doing it on tiktok though.

OnlyFans is instagram but for porn. If they want to escape that, they're gonna have to rebrand.

deeviant2• 5 years ago

You absolutely must be living in an alternate reality than I am.

1. Onlyfans is extremely well know to the point of being a meme, you couldn't be more wrong. Like what rock would you have to be hiding under to not have heard of OF?

2. Exactly what about Patreon seems ripe for disruption? Looking for something specific here, hopefully something that wouldn't apply to most every other company.

3. ??? But only-fans literally became a billion-dollar unicorn on the back of porn. Like, I'm speechless, really, I am.

Cullinet2• 5 years ago

I'm thinking of the wider insanity to create a economy so large as to almost acquire Web Scale, but only for a financial customer base of individuals who are lacking in the necessary skills and knowledge and motivation and experience to organise themselves into the pressure groups you absolutely have to have prepared to defend your business in the morality courts of post WWII America. Larry Flynt had his work cut out for him with much more modest content.

EDIT to add :

If you argue ad absurdam that everyone is going to be exposed to everyone for moral judgement of their rights to online existence, then maybe we need a more sophisticated and practically judicious and efficient system of adjudication of the legal entitlements and freedoms endowed to everyone, than "I know it when I see it ".

This needs a logical codex. Literally a logical reduction of the comprehensive semantics used to describe unacceptable content. From which we can apply triage to emergency cases of accused indecency. Too many cases are heard so immediately in the courts of public opprobrium exclusively in hostile environments where the most sympathetic media is bound and restricted from venturing any actual support virtually ensuring that the rights of the publisher are lost. This is ignoring the issues of commercial withdrawal of essential services.

imwillofficial3• 5 years ago

You used many words and said nothing.

jazzyjackson4• 5 years ago

Is this a Markov chain or something?

stjohnswarts9• 5 years ago

Just because they think they need to always be growing, rather than just raking in the cash. Their value will go to 1/4 practically overnight is what I'm guessing.

dillondoyle• 5 years ago

Why isn't it their choice given the huge profit numbers presented in the leaked pitch deck? Are their server costs really more than hundreds of millions?

ggggtez2• 5 years ago

I feel like Tumblr was actually growing when they made they change (which promptly killed their growth). I don't see how Only Fans is going to remain solvent without their core creators.

Abishek_Muthian3• 5 years ago

I read that sex-workers have lost their livelihood during the pandemic due to lockdowns and have become more vulnerable. Then I read the interview of Aella, A OnlyFans creator making 5-figures on IndieHackers[1].

I always felt porn was an exploitative business so was never into it, But I gained respect for OnlyFans as a platform because it enabled people to move from dangerous, risky work to relatively safe work. As with any content platform, I understand that only perhaps top 5% might make sustainable business out of it but still it's a choice available.

Now they've blown it, In order to chase after scale OnlyFans has decided to sacrifice their original customers. Fans of those music artists who are supposedly joining now should inform them that OnlyFans is robbing the livelihood and would be pushing many back to dangerous physical-sex work.

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/211-aella-savannah-solo

bladelessninja23• 5 years ago

I gained respect for OnlyFans as a platform because it enabled people to move from dangerous, risky work to relatively safe work

What about not getting into this and, thus, not being exposed to any risks? Sex-work nowadays is the matter of choice, it's not how it used to be in pre-internet era.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

Few artists want to be associated with that by now. If people present their onlyfans, customers expect nude pictures.

austhrow743• 5 years ago

Is everyone else who isn't running a porn subscription company also robbing potential porn creators of a livelihood or is this a helping people a little is worse than doing nothing type situation?

banannaise2• 5 years ago

Aella already had a monetized following prior to onlyfans. She is not representative of the potential of a new content creator.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

Possibly, but they will raise funds or do an IPO with the inertia and numbers from their porn days. One of the founders would be bought out in the next investment round.

captainmuon• 5 years ago

This seems almost like an automatism by now, that platforms pivot away from sexual content after a while. Remember, in the beginning Snapchat was considered a sexting app where you could safely send nudes, although it was not advertized as such. They moved to a more regular social app after some time.

Tinder was initially sometimes described as an app to find people nearby who want to hook up. Like a one-night-stand-radar. It quickly positioned itself as more traditional dating app (although very focused on visuals).

And although not sexual, I think what happend to YikYak is similar. They started as this anarchic platform where you anonymously could talk shit about local topics and people. And then they realized that is probably not what they want because it causes outrage, so they tried to nerf that aspect (which is the whole allure of the platform).

Sometimes the sanitizing works (Snapchat), sometimes it kills the app (Tumblr, YikYak). But in any case I'd wish there would still be a place for the anarchic, 'unmoral', wild ideas in our society.

onetimeusename• 5 years ago

This is a late reply but my interpretation of the events is that the payment processors drove this decision and I think that would be for one or two reasons.

1) There is a high chargeback and dispute rate on porn. I don't know why.

2) OnlyFans has underage performers who get on there using fake IDs and there is not a very good way to stop that.

lamontcg• 5 years ago

April 1st in August?

Ansil8494• 5 years ago

This doesn't make any sense. It's like if the Food Network suddenly announced that due to mounting pressure from advertisers, they would no longer be airing any cooking shows.

tobyjsullivan• 5 years ago

So the history channel then?

Ansil8494• 5 years ago

Or The Learning Channel. Or I guess basically any other ostensibly nonfiction programming American channel :(.

fzzzy• 5 years ago

This made me laugh out loud.

drcode• 5 years ago

Or like MTV no longer showing music videos 24/7

wayoutthere2• 5 years ago

Is there anything else on OnlyFans? Without porn, OnlyFans is just another Patreon knock-off.

TillE3• 5 years ago

It sounds like they'll basically continue to allow tasteful nudes, which is probably about half their content. So they're only killing an enormous fraction of their business, not the entire thing.

nickthegreek4• 5 years ago

half the content, 85% of the money.

wayoutthere2• 5 years ago

Actually yeah, from the content creators I know and have talked to, as long as you’re verified on the platform you can still post whatever. The assumption seems to be that solo stuff will still be fine, but maybe not the actual sex.

But it will still effectively be a crackdown on marginalized sexualities seen as “deviant” (aka the trans and bdsm communities). That was honestly the majority of the sexual content on Tumblr back in the day; they were on Tumblr because the mainstream porn industry doesn’t create a space that isn’t exploitative and fetishy.

The same is true on OF - trans men and women making porn are way disproportionately represented in the top creators lists. Sex work is how a lot of trans people have had to survive, and OF has made sex work much safer than it’s ever been. It would be a shame to lose an outlet like this — tempts me to go out and create one specifically for porn.

ctoth2• 5 years ago

But sex work still has a stigma. And OnlyFans is trying to raise money from outside investors at a valuation of more than $1 billion.
The company handled more than $2 billion in sales last year, and is on pace to more than double that this year. It keeps 20% of that figure.

So they're killing the golden goose to placate outside money when they already are making ~800M a year?

Something here doesn't really add up but I don't know enough about this field to see what I'm missing.

djrogers• 5 years ago

Your math is off - 20-% of 2b is $400m

snypher• 5 years ago

They're doubling that this year, so 4b?

lotsofpulp5• 5 years ago

citing mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers

Based on the tweet, I would presume their ability accept payment via the established payment networks is being threatened.

pvarangot4• 5 years ago

Yeah, they are basically screwing up their investors. They pumped up the valuation being a porn site and now will get a bunch of money with low dilution for hiring more executives and stuff probably with a stupid plan like "we are going to be the next Twitter" that will fail in like three years.

mrRandomGuy2• 5 years ago

Who the fuck is using OnlyFans for something _other_ than porn?

t-writescode3• 5 years ago

Apparently the LTT OnlyFans was very popular when it was around.

stonecharioteer• 5 years ago

I did not need to imagine Linus playing with himself today.

Sebb7679• 5 years ago

As a joke of them doing porn. I heard there are Minecraft Let's Plays on PornHub, but I doubt they'll cut of porn to go full in on Let's Plays (and if they did, it would probably kill them like this will kill OF).

TekMol• 5 years ago

    mounting pressure from banking
    partners and payment providers

HN is often sceptical about use cases for crypto beyond speculation.

This looks like one.

root_axis2• 5 years ago

So why do you think they decided to ban sexually explicit content rather than use cryptocurrency?

nathias3• 5 years ago

because the payment providers have 99% of market share?

short_sells_poo• 5 years ago

I'm one of those vocal sceptics on HN. I agree with you! Here's finally a huge industry that is consistently shunned by the mainstream payment providers.

I'm not being facetious. I believe it's a one of a kind opportunity for crypto currencies to step in, show the middle finger to the established payment pipelines and prove that a smooth, reliable and safe payment system can be operated even for the adult industry.

According to the Guardian[1] the adult industry clears between $10bln-$100bln a year. That's a lot turnover and clearly they are not being served well by the current providers. I'd imagine the fees are also acceptably higher (due to the increased fraud, etc..) so the profit margins should also be potentially higher.

__MatrixMan__4• 5 years ago

You're right. I'm sure somebody is working on cryptonlyfans already.

I'm already preparing myself to be appalled by whatever the NFT scene does with this.

o_m• 5 years ago

What is stopping MasterCard and Visa from banning Coinbase and others if this happens

sosuke• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if that would have any effect at all. I put money into Coinbase and pull it out of Coinbase with a bank account. Buying crypto with a credit card isn't a great idea.

bawolff• 5 years ago

If bitcoin didnt get banned over drugs and murder-for-hire schemes, i cant imagine porn will be the tipping point.

cma• 5 years ago

Does coinbase even take credit cards?

https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/add-a-...

goatmeal• 5 years ago

most of the folks I know fund their exchange accounts via ACH and not their card

tomjen34• 5 years ago

They can't ban everything, since at the extremis you could buy crypto from eBay sellers.

But in the long run you are right: to avoid MasterCard and Visa we should move everything to crypto. It is the only way to control our own destiny.

Seattle35032• 5 years ago

Most exchanges do ACH, wires, or other methods. Kraken is opening its own bank eventually, and will take direct deposits.

xtat• 5 years ago

We don't need them.

abetusk• 5 years ago

HN often touts that crypto is either a Ponzi/MLM scheme or has as its only use criminal activity.

If you make basic payment processing for services criminal, then, by definition, cryptocurrency's primary use case is for criminal activity.

tofuahdude4• 5 years ago

Porn isn't criminal... ?

coldtea• 5 years ago

Upcoming headline: "OnlyFans to close down business starting in November"

dweekly• 5 years ago

It sure sounds like this was forced on them by their payment processors, not that this was a voluntary move.

https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1428420774449266691?s=...

l33t23284• 5 years ago

This is absolutely ridiculous.

What if they decide people can no longer buy dildos or lube or condoms or guns or alcohol or meat on Fridays?

There’s no law with respect to “payment neutrality”??

emodendroket20• 5 years ago

Why should there be? It seems absurd to MANDATE anyone participate in the sex trade. There are payment processors who specialize in adult content.

ozim2• 5 years ago

That is called democracy and yes there are a lot of things that are not sold.

General public agrees that explicit material is bad.

Right now we have in Poland shops closed each Sunday - it is annoying for me. Selling alcohol in Norway is heavily restricted and I see more and more restrictions on alcohol sales in Poland.

Explicit material is tied a lot to money laundering, there is also a lot of scams tied to it and lots of stolen cards are used to pay for explicit material. It is huge cost for payment providers, all the laws for anti-laundering trump any "payment neutrality".

If you want to see naked ladies go to "a place" and risk on your own, pay with cash.

_jal• 5 years ago

Remember this next time people start pushing going cashless.

Doing so means that a third party is involved in every transaction you make, and that someone else will always have veto power over your commercial transactions.

boplicity• 5 years ago

1. Freedom of Speech extends to all parties in a relationship

2. Freedom of speech includes choosing who I work with

3. It makes sense to have certain restrictions on freedom of speech, especially as it relates to clearly harmful discrimination (i.e. racial discrimination, gender discrimination)

4. It does not make sense to restrict freedom of speech in the case of pornography, specifically, whether a company can choose to work with pornographers or not

jpeter• 5 years ago

Why should payment processors force them to. They will make less money

emodendroket20• 5 years ago

Probably the reputational risk to them from being associated with porn is not worth whatever OnlyFans brings in.

gumby3• 5 years ago

I had a friend who ran a “sexually explicit” site you’ve heard of. He was paying north of 25% to payment processors (compare to less than .2% restaurants pay…though his margins were much bigger).

The payment processors take this attitude because that way they can tell congress they are “doing something about vice”, and in exchange not be subject to undesired regulations.

I suspect this kind of soft pressure is being applied to Apple in the background. Everyone remembers what happened to Joe Nacchio, and resisting such pressure is harder now than it was over the last four years.

yibg• 5 years ago

Adult content usually has a high charge back rate. “What? How did this get here? My card must’ve been stolen” when the spouse sees the statement.

_rpd2• 5 years ago

If you think about what payment processors actually do, dealing with fraud is one of the main costs. There's a lot of fraud associated with porn related transactions, so it can make financial sense to just drop the entire transaction category.

jlengrand• 5 years ago

Because it is a high risk area, just like gambling

dhosek• 5 years ago

Some years ago I interviewed with a company that served as a payment risk processor for high-risk businesses (in short, porn).

The chargeback rate on online porn is huge. As a result, where a traditional payment processor may be 1.3–3.5% depending on the business and the assessed risk, for a high-risk business, the rate can be much much higher. While Onlyfans keeps 20%, I'm guessing that they'd be badly hurt if they had to give half that to their payment processor. I'm sure they've looked at their numbers and they find the non-porn providers are more profitable to them, especially if it means they can lower their processing fees. Booting the porn providers will likely also make it easier to recruit more non-porn providers.

throwawaysea3• 5 years ago

We really need an alternative to big payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Stripe, etc. Moving money around is so fundamental to basic living that it shouldn't be solely possible through duopolies or oligopolies, and it is morally and ethically unacceptable that these companies seek to impost their own morals and politics upon others who are voluntarily transacting with each other. We've known this was a problem for a LONG time now, going back to when the credit card companies colluded to institute a payment blockade against Wikileaks over 10 years ago (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...). I'm disappointed we aren't in a better place yet. We need renewed antitrust legislation to take control of big tech and payment processors. They are as influential as governments, and cannot be allowed to discriminate, just like your water utility cannot discriminate against you based on your personal life or politics.

rejectedandsad2• 5 years ago

The fact that OF is not all in on crypto payments is a massive indictment of crypto as a payment mechanism.

serverholic2• 5 years ago

Or that crypto is only 12 years old which is really fucking young for a currency.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

I'm still surprised nobody tried to bridge the two .. it seems like the most obvious of shark fad business move

smt887• 5 years ago

Even if OF could accept crypto, they'd still need an off-ramp back into fiat. They can't operate only on crypto, even just stablecoins, which is itself the indictment of crypto.

zz8653• 5 years ago

It also highlights the lack of anonymity with crypto - everyone gets to see what you spend money on.

young_unixer3• 5 years ago

Huh? Many services on the Internet accept crypto, Namecheap is a good example.

fennecfoxen• 5 years ago

It might be easier to operate a dodgy site off of USPS money orders than it would be off of cryptocurrency.

mzs2• 5 years ago

and possibly FOSTA-SESTA too

MomoXenosaga• 5 years ago

This is why America needs to work beyond it's fascination with creditcards.

Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want short of the terrorist watchlist.

guerrilla2• 5 years ago

Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want short of the terrorist watchlist.

Is that true?

jjulius3• 5 years ago

And yet they all stopped processing payments for PornHub.

Please cite a source(s) for your claim, re: "banks can't block shit"

thebean11• 5 years ago

Weren't banks closing accounts over Coinbase transactions a couple years ago?

ipsum22• 5 years ago

Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want

I don't think this is true for things that are in a gray area - storing profits from cannabis where its legalized and purchasing cryptocurrency

https://decrypt.co/39226/banks-still-blocking-crypto-transac...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthoban/2020/08/18/the-cann...

(Although the cannabis one seems to have changed recently)

bitwize2• 5 years ago

Since the Obama administration the government has been using threats of increased regulatory scrutiny against banks that do not block transactions dealing with certain undesirable industries including guns, cannabis, and porn -- whether such transactions are legal or not.

eximius• 5 years ago

Our banks are horribly, horribly insecure. I use a credit card because we don't have a good way to use our banks.

mbesto5• 5 years ago

Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want short of the terrorist watchlist.

Try opening a bank account at BoA for your cannabis business.

miohtama6• 5 years ago

Here is the story https://www.xbiz.com/news/258606/heres-what-the-new-masterca...

But sounds like OnlyFans could have complied with verification requirements, like PornHub had done?

obviouslynotme• 5 years ago

You would think that it would be profitable enough for them to become their own bank and processor if no one else would. This right here tells me they knew they couldn't. Why? Who is telling them no? How can we live in a place where LEGAL businesses are purposefully excluded from the market?

I think they should start taking Bitcoin or Monero. Fuck MasterCard and whoever dictates what they do. If you are going to be forced into bankruptcy, at least do it in style.

throwaway0a5e3• 5 years ago

You would think that it would be profitable enough for them to become their own bank and processor if no one else wou

Or just buy a bank. Surely they could have raised the capital.

miohtama6• 5 years ago

The requirements from MasterCard are here and not impossible to comply https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/142844966253361972...

bambax• 5 years ago

It may be so, but they won't need payment processors once they don't have payments, or users.

bruceb2• 5 years ago

The winner here is a majority of OF performers who are mortgaging their future reputation for present small payouts.

watwut3• 5 years ago

Isnt that kind of ridiculous?

If there is a case for cancel culture, free speech or capitalism issue, this sounds like it. Few powerful players systematically destroying speech and business because they don't like it.

croes• 5 years ago

So I can buy porn in a store but not online? What's next? They are payment providers not the moral police.

That's one of the advantages of cash.

nathias3• 5 years ago

Imagine there was a huge oligopoly of payment providers that had full control of global online economy explicitly regulating content.

epa• 5 years ago

This is what happens when you have risk adverse execs getting paid too much.

weezin• 5 years ago

Sue Visa and MC for anti-trust and start working on crypto payments immediately.

post_break• 5 years ago

This makes me think of Operation Choke Point. I understand payment processors need to limit fraud and risk, but at what point do they get to determine what a legal business does? I understand the mental gymnastics involved to think a private business gets to choose who they do business with, but when there are only a handful of businesses doing the processing what then?

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

yellow_lead• 5 years ago

A reason governments like monopolies - they centralize control. This applies to many industries: telecom, cellphones, social media, etc.

Freak_NL3• 5 years ago

Why can PornHub successfully sell a premium porn service but OnlyFans cannot? Is it just the size of the company?

emodendroket20• 5 years ago

I don't know if you were aware but PornHub had a massive scandal with the content people were uploading that led to them basically deleting the majority of user contributions altogether. So maybe not so easy for them either.

Freak_NL3• 5 years ago

Wasn't that a copyright issue? People uploading stuff for which they didn't own the authorship rights?

OnlyFans does not seem to have that problem at any significant scale at all, so why can't they figure out a way to handle payments for porn?

LegitShady4• 5 years ago

pornhub is having this issue exactly. They got PNG'd by all the payment processors. They only have crypto payment options now. My bet is pornhub is doing a lot worse now than they were before.

https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/pornhub-crypto-news

Freak_NL3• 5 years ago

Their FAQ is still showing that they offer credit card payments via Probiller, but clicking onwards does indeed show them temporarily not accepting credit card payments, defaulting to a SEPA transfer instead.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

Is there a difference between the title and "OnlyFans to shut down in October"? I literally didn't know OnlyFans had anything else besides porn/porn-esque material.

emodendroket20• 5 years ago

At some point I think they intended to be something line a competitor to Patreon. It also sounds like they're going to keep allowing softcore content.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

It also sounds like they're going to keep allowing softcore content.

That is such puritanical nonsense. You can show naked people rubbing together, but the moment you show a penis in a vagina, Satan comes to get you.

ramesh312• 5 years ago

Digital pimpin' ain't easy. If it was, everyone would do it.

ctoth2• 5 years ago

From my understanding, one of the major reasons that payment processors don't like porn is the regretful customer problem, which makes this sort of content a lot more likely to be disputed/have chargebacks. One of the oft-mentioned downsides to Cryptocurrency is the 'no takebacks' property. Perhaps these two things fit together? Also avoids the problem of payment processors dictating morality.

drenvuk• 5 years ago

Payment processors need to be regulated in a way to prevent this stuff from happening. This is financial censorship for legal activities.

Sargos3• 5 years ago

I'm not sure the government has a problem with this as they just passed FOSTA-SESTA which nearly makes porn illegal.

buzzwords2• 5 years ago

Anyone know if there are any legal recourse for them?

bdcravens• 5 years ago

According to OnlyFans, nudity is still allowed (be interesting to see where they draw the line regarding what's explicit)

digitcatphd3• 5 years ago

The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, starting in October. Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos.

Makes sense

digitcatphd3• 5 years ago

"The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, starting in October. Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos"

Makes sense

SlowRobotAhead2• 5 years ago

Makes sense

Does it?

Nude is ok, but sexual isn’t? What if I find nude sexual, what if I find sexual separate from nudity? Why business is it of payment processors to say what is OK when it comes to sexuality?

digitcatphd3• 5 years ago

lol, mate you seem personally offended by this satirical statement pointing out the conflicting logic

savant_penguin• 5 years ago

Next up

Google blocks search and Twitter blocks politics

gregoriol• 5 years ago

One reason often cited for payment processors not wanting adult companies is because of high level of chargebacks, but I don't understand this in the situation at hand here: it is not that this company is going to stop accepting payments, it is that they are going to prevent sexual content and keep nudity, so it shouldn't change much the behavior expected around those chargebacks?

8eye• 5 years ago

i’ll say it, who wants to go co-founder on a new startup idea?

moneywoes• 5 years ago

Why not lol

orliesaurus2• 5 years ago

i'm down

candylifter• 5 years ago

Let’s do it

ScionOfDesign2• 5 years ago

This is a topic I've been researching for years. I run an adult game company myself. If there are other technical people willing to work on something to solve this problem at its core, I'd help.

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/ETIG3

noxer• 5 years ago

Who's the first to makes a CryptoOnlyFans?

I see 2 losers here OnlyFans and the banks.

jbverschoor• 5 years ago

Banks, payment processors are the police officers, or rather soldiers of the world.

They're really just helping the adoption to mainstream crypto.

rvz• 5 years ago

The changes are needed because of mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers, according to the company.

Fintech's finest financially suffocating OnlyFans, forcing them to ban explicit videos off of their platform.

Somebody has got to lose.

Loeffelmaenn• 5 years ago

It really doesn't sit right with me that payment processors can emit such a huge pressure that OnlyFans is willing to loose 99.9% of their userbase becuase they just have no other choice.

MrBuddyCasino• 5 years ago

Its almost as if Yarvin had a point when he described The Cathedral.

perardi7• 5 years ago

Wow, you spend years thinking crypto is convoluted nonsense…and then something comes along that impacts a lot of your friends, and you start to change your mind.

I have a fair number† of friends and acquaintances who have OnlyFans. Some for side income, some for a substantial portion of their livelihood. And to see that get taken away because the payment processors want them to fall in line…I guess I’m on the crypto train now.

†Yes, I have a slightly strange life, I know.

im3w1l• 5 years ago

I'm curious, what fraction of their material, income is nudes (still allowed) and what fraction is sexually explicit?

perardi7• 5 years ago

…well I am not going to go through and do a full audit, but a fair bit is explicit, and realistically people are paying for the videos and not the stills.

bob332123• 5 years ago

Someone else will replicate of

perardi7• 5 years ago

Sustainably? Or will they replicate, survive for a while, get to a critical mass, and then get nuked from orbit by Visa?

cblconfederate8• 5 years ago

there are already a few competitors, and afaik pornhub cleaned up its content in order to follow that model. If they are registered to hands-off countries they ll probably steal OF's thunder overnight.

tofuahdude4• 5 years ago

"This is all garbage" followed by "Oh, it happened to me or my loved ones and now it's not garbage" is such a classic pattern across so many controversial topics.

I wonder how we can be more open minded as a society while still keeping enough skepticism to not accept literal garbage.

tmp_anon_223• 5 years ago

Reminds me of all the politicians who were anti-LGBT until one of their kids came out and then they miraculously flip flop.

perardi7• 5 years ago

Yeah, I absolutely admit to my hypocrisy and/or short-sighted attitude here.

rkalla• 5 years ago

Serious Question: Do they all use it for adult content? I've never used OF but see the porn/adult references all the time so I assumed that is all it was (obviously not it seems?)

killingtime74• 5 years ago

Of course they do. No one paying to see Someone put legos together

perardi7• 5 years ago

I am sure someone is going to come up with silly edge case examples, but OnlyFans is for porn, and anyone else who says otherwise is trying to spin you.

moonchrome2• 5 years ago

If crypto was actually a viable alternative they wouldn't be doing this.

I'm not against the promises of crypto - but the tech so far has failed to deliver anything but a platform to streamline illegal activity, asset speculation bubbles and a whole bunch of wasted energy/hardware along with reliving the problems people had historically with bank fraud in free banking and the likes (banks printing their own notes without cover till you get a bank run - this is why central banks were invented ...)

dvdkon3• 5 years ago

The properties of certain cryptocurrencies that make them good for illegal transactions also make them good for pornography and other "not illegal but touchy" areas.

lynx2343• 5 years ago

The tech is there but mainstream adoption and understanding is still coming along. It's incredibly easy and cheap to send USDC or DAI to OnlyFans if they accept tokens on a sidechain (like Polygon or Fantom).

You don't have to sign up for an account or provide any personal info, just use your wallet to send certain tokens to an address, then you can use that wallet as a sign-in.

OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.

It's a more seamless user experience and solves the payment processing issue.

In my opinion it's a matter of educating the masses to a very different method of paying for services and using services (both on the business and consumer side).

redisman3• 5 years ago

There are many cryptos that would be perfectly viable for payments here. XLM, USDC, Polygon for example. I think the investors told them that it’s too niche and they’d rather have credit card payments for whatever remains after the policy change.

noobermin3• 5 years ago

Honest question, I tried to ask it below: the optics issues of being associated with illegal activity, being a waste of energy and hardware during a chip shortage, as well as the actual reality that most people in crypto are speculators at this point, these seem like issues that crypto advocates can actually recognize and address so crypto can achieve wider adoption. It unfortunately feels like crypto enthusiasts just dismiss these concerns and think they don't matter, which just maintains the status quo with respect to its adoption.

teawrecks• 5 years ago

The "only people doing illegal stuff use it" point doesn't really hold up when you consider how much energy is going into keeping legal uses less convenient than centralized finance. It's like saying only robbers wear masks, and then we have a pandemic and suddenly everyone does. With the right economic incentives, defi is a tool waiting for the right moment to shine. This could be such a moment.

saurik• 5 years ago

So, here is the core problem: if you want to do this on mobile... how? You can't do the actual payment parts securely using just a web browser--if you think about it that kind of undermines the whole concept for a lot of people: you would need to host that website somewhere--and then crypto wallets that support dapps and payment processing tend to get banned by Apple, because they provide a way to bypass their cut for services using an app (even if that app is just a browser) :/.

xvector4• 5 years ago

If crypto was actually a viable alternative they wouldn't be doing this.

Adoption is a thing and takes time. Crypto itself is also a technology still in its infancy with at least a decade+ of engineering remaining to begin to resemble something that everyday people can use, but it's already quite promising.

cblconfederate8• 5 years ago

It's none of our business if your life is strange, the question is if it's illegal, which it isn't.

perardi7• 5 years ago

I’m sure there’s got to be other full-time UI designers/part-time circuit queens out there. Can’t be that weird.

But yes, these are consenting adults (a fair number of them quite highly educated and absolutely aware of what they are doing) selling solo videos or videos with other consenting adults. It’s legal, it’s a huge business, and it’s dumb to push it further to the fringes.

adamcharnock5• 5 years ago

A number of my friends and loved ones will be affected by this, and many more have been thrown under the payment processing bus before.

And forgive me if this seems ranty, but it isn’t just payment processors, it seems to permeate so much that comes out of the USA. See the various App Store rules too.

And this isn’t about fraud rates. Because why are the fraud rates high? It’s because the sex whole industry is pushed to the fringes, and loaded with shame. “Oh that payment wasn’t me, my card must have been stolen”.

I feel pretty angry how much this puritanical nature in a foreign country affects the people I care about around me.

If you can let China censor your platforms, you can let Europeans have porn.

Ok, rant over. Please don’t downvote too heavily.

observer23• 5 years ago

China allows online porn and their citizens have no trouble with Chinese payment processors accepting purchases for porn.

throwawaylinux3• 5 years ago

Who is "you"? What point is this rant supposed to be making?

They're private companies, they have the freedom to do what they like, and "you" are free to start your own payment processor.

agilob• 5 years ago

And to see that get taken away because the payment processors

There was a story about an online dildo seller who couldn't sell specific colour of dildos because American Express didn't like them. I think it was lovehoney

cbdumas3• 5 years ago

The fact that OnlyFans isn't even trying to move to crypto to keep their business alive is a stunning indictment of the state of crypto as a viable payment method.

marvin5• 5 years ago

Couldn't the explanation be as simple as them lacking imagination? They're not a Silicon Valley funded startup. My impression is they lucked into the golden goose, and this move makes me think they're downright clueless about their options when things get adversarial.

Acrobatic_Road• 5 years ago

Who says they won't? PH did when this happened to them. Now they accepting like 60 diffferent cryptocurrencies.

wraptile• 5 years ago

Why do we somehow assume that OnlyFans - a company that basically stumbled into success with zero innovation or business prowess - is even capable of adopting crypto in such way?

Of all companies that could adopt mass crypto this one would be somewhere at the bottom of the list imho.

toomim• 5 years ago

There simply aren't enough consumers with crypto to spend yet.

The percentage of consumers with crypto is maybe 1%. The percentage with credit cards is maybe 90%. If OnlyFans moves to crypto, they cut their addressable market by 98%.

xvector4• 5 years ago

It's really just an indictment of OnlyFans lacking any imagination, or, well, balls. They are going to crash and burn anyways - they could have at least tried something like this. Instead they will just pathetically fizzle out, desperately clutching to the few pennies they will have left after this, unwilling to take a risk that might reap great reward and actual change.

thepasswordis2• 5 years ago

†Yes, I have a slightly strange life, I know.

No you don't. There are many people who are become porn actors as a result of only fans. That is likely why this is happening.

superfrank4• 5 years ago

I worked at a webcam pornography company (as a software engineer) a few years ago and honestly, I get it from the processors perspective. I wasn't privy to all the conversations, but I know at the time, some higher ups were toying around with the idea of basically building an entire in house payment processor to handle transactions.

I think a lot of people think the processors are doing this out of some moral high ground to try and kill off the pornography business, but that's not what's happening. It's all about risk and opportunity cost. I forget the exact numbers, but pornography and gambling are near the top of the list when you look at industries with the highest number of fraudulent transactions. When someone reports a transaction as fraudulent, the money to refund the customer comes out someone behind the scenes pocket and often that money gets tied up in limbo while everyone points fingers at everyone else. Dealing with fraudulent transactions is a massive headache that wastes a ton of time.

Most major processors just don't want to deal with the hassle and the ones who do charge extremely high fees to offset the extra risk. OF has probably been using a processor that doesn't allow for pornography this whole time, but the processor has been letting it slide. My guess would be the risk has finally grown too large and the processor is cracking down. Like I said, there are other processors out there who are happy to work with the porn industry for a much higher fee, but it seems like OF has decided for one reason or another that that isn't as lucrative as just banning explicit content all together.

ryanlol6• 5 years ago

Big Porn like onlyfans and pornhub are not being targetted by cc companies because of fraud rates, but because of the weird Christian fundamentalist lobby in America.

belorn3• 5 years ago

I have seen several times stories on HN about the problems porn sites has with processors, but I never heard that gambling sites had the same issues. It would be interesting to hear more about that.

bjowen• 5 years ago

The dispute rate is certainly true for companies under the general umbrella of “subscription services”, usually meaning porn / webcam sites, and there are trigger points where the payment processor will switch off a facility that exceeds a certain dispute volume.

OF has been increasingly making use of step-up authentication to avoid disputes, which is the way the non-US payments industry is heading. My guess would be that if disputes are in fact the reason, it’ll be because the step-up authentication isn’t available or working for some significant slice of the market.

That said, I don’t think that’s the reason. Switching off porn altogether means the vast majority(citation needed) of OF’s content will be gone, which means this has to be a life-or-death move. MC has been placing legality/consent/age restrictions on adult content, including real-time monitoring of content / chat [0]. My guess is that this is onerous enough that it breaks OF’s business model.

[0] https://www.webshield.com/post/mastercard-introduces-revised...

brundolf• 5 years ago

It also puts crypto in an interesting new light: circumventing sovereign governments and regulations was always a fool's errand in my opinion. But circumventing private payment providers that have decided to do extralegal morality-policing... that's a much more realistic and interesting thing to aim for.

BLKNSLVR• 5 years ago

To make a minor nitpick, Bitcoin was created in response to the GFC bailouts, which was essentially forced government action as a result of private banking greed, fraud, and / or incompetence.

The circumvention you mention is incidental, not primary. "Something better" was the, admittedly lofty, goal. And if not purely "something better" then at least "an alternative".

young_unixer3• 5 years ago

circumventing sovereign governments and regulations was always a fool's errand in my opinion.

For big companies that have to respect laws anyway, yes, but it still brings lots of opportunities for regular people and small organizations that can fly under the government's radar.

ibejoeb• 5 years ago

Looking like GabPay might find a big new client

quickthrower23• 5 years ago

You are blaming the wrong party! Your friends shouldn't rely on income from one customer who holds all the cards (did your friends negotiate a contract with OF with the help of a lawyer?). Lesson learned for them. They can now run their own sites and do marketing etc. themselves and learn how to run a business.

concordDance8• 5 years ago

Yet more skills they have to have... also, I presume OnlyFans helps with the pipeline. (Much more likely to be comfortable clicking on an onlyfans link than a link to an unknown website)

bigdollopenergy• 5 years ago

So i don't necessarily like OnlyFans and I think it's a dangerous game to play for contributors. That said, why are payment processors deciding which businesses get to exist? I understand that the fraud rate is higher than normal, but how high is it? Could it not be handled by a higher than normal transaction fee?

It bothers me that they have the power to shut businesses based on what appears to be their own subjective moral code. If a website is shutdown for any reason it should be due them breaking some law, not the payment processors feelings.

Regulation should passed to stop this from happening. While a lot of people may agree with their actions so far, it shouldn't be their decision to do this.

jwond2• 5 years ago

It seems a lot of people in this post are opposed to payment processors pressuring OnlyFans to do this.

When Google, Apple, Amazon, et al. simultaneously took actions that resulted in the shutdown of Gab it seemed a lot of people supported it.

Now they could very well be completely disjoint groups, but I’d be interested if anyone who opposes the payment processors pressuring OnlyFans but supported the actions taken against Gab could explain how they reconcile the two positions. In both cases we have companies with dominant positions in the market denying or threatening to deny crucial services to another company.

ribosometronome9• 5 years ago

Are you surprised folk agree with things that fit their morals and disagree with ones that don't? Gab was being used to promote hate, violence, and misinformation. Onlyfans is not those things.

This feels akin to saying something like, "Oh, you were onboard when the government criminalized murder, how do you feel now that they're criminalizing weed?!"

jwond2• 5 years ago

Gab was being used to promote hate, violence, and misinformation

So is every other social media site

stale20025• 5 years ago

The point is that people who talk about a slippery slope were correct.

The more that you let large and powerful organizations, get away with targeting groups that you don't like, the more likely that those powerful organizations are going to be able to turn the guns on you, or your favorite cause, when public opinion doesn't go your way.

Neutral platforms, that don't discrimination, protects your enemies as well as your self. The slippery slope is real.

The people who oppose neutral platforms have made their bed. Now we'll see if they change their mind once they have to lay in it.

Redoubts• 5 years ago

I’d be interested if anyone who opposes the payment processors pressuring OnlyFans but supported the actions taken against Gab could explain how they reconcile the two positions.

I think most people would reconcile them fairly easily. Do you think there’s a surprising answer to be had here?

evol262• 5 years ago

One provided a shelter for incitement to violence, culminating in an attack on the US Capitol.

The other one is naked people.

It's the difference between suing someone because they yelled "fire!" in a crowded adult theatre and being an actor on the stage of that theatre.

standardUser2• 5 years ago

The difference, of course, is threats and violence. I don't imagine many OnlyFans models are mentioning their love of firearms in the same breathe as they mention that civilization will end if we don't establish an all-white ethnostate.

caslon• 5 years ago

There is a duopoly in payment processing because it's the most regulated industry in the world. Google, Apple and Amazon are in vastly different businesses, rose to where they were based on the free market and are sustained by it, would be there with or without regulation, and will eventually be replaced.

Personally I don't really care about either of these scenarios and a whole lot of the people complaining about this one are doing it for pretty obvious self-interested reasons, but you're being disingenuous by acting like these are the same thing. Visa and Mastercard are a government-enforced duopoly (with a few minor similarly-enforced exceptions). No tech company is as meaningfully.

claaams• 5 years ago

Whose daughter at the payment processor was doing onlyfans that got them all riled up?

uncoder0• 5 years ago

You joke... but having personally seen how many decisions are made this way at high levels of corporations and even government this is rather plausible.

barbazoo2• 5 years ago

The changes are needed because of mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers, according to the company.

What's their argument here, is there a law being broken or is the pressure motivated by ethics or something else?

jefftechentin• 5 years ago

I remember PH having the same issue. Do payment processors take on liability for facilitating sexual content that is illegal in some way? Is it a PR thing? Is mastercard owned by the Holy See? What's the deal?

HaloZero• 5 years ago

Most likely it's about FOSTA-SESTA in the United States which exempts you from Section 230.

taylodl• 5 years ago

Sadly I know girls who are using OnlyFans to keep a roof over their heads and stay out of abusive relationships. Whether we like what they're doing to make money OnlyFans was providing them a much-needed revenue stream. Now that's being taken away from them by the morality police who won't be affected by the consequences of their own decisions.

throwaway57523• 5 years ago

With all due respect, the fact that anyone is forced into porn to get housing be safe from abusive partners is the indictment of a society.

I get that it's a de facto situation for some, but let's not drop the onus on "morality police", payment processors, and OnlyFans for a massive societal failure to help vulnerable people. You could take that argument as far as you want (prostitution, drug sales, etc). There is some level of dignity that everyone's entitled to. If someone does OF by choice because they love it, good for them. If someone is compelled to in order to feed their kids or leave an abusive partner, then we should all be ashamed of that.

theshrike792• 5 years ago

It doesn't have to be "porn".

People are making huge bank with content you could post on Instagram without fear of being banned.

beiller• 5 years ago

You make the claim they are forced but do you have any sources for that claim? All I can say for sure is that now, they are forced out of porn. This problem is not directly a morality problem. It is a chargeback issue. More like chargebacks via stigmiziation of sexuality but that is just an opinion.

handmodel• 5 years ago

I do not consume OF but tbh if I was an attractive girl I would probably choose making 80k a year on OF over 30k a year as a hostess or factory worker or whatever. I don't think it is exploitative or has less dignity than these.

throwaway0a5e3• 5 years ago

They're not forced into it the same way nobody is forced to be an under the table construction laborer. They just consider it to be a better all things considered way to make a living than getting a fast food job or whatever.

SilasX• 5 years ago

Agreed, I think this is a crappy policy and I feel sorry for those that would get hurt by it, but blaming it for the suffering of domestic violence victims is over-the-top.

pessimizer• 5 years ago

the fact that anyone is forced into porn to get housing be safe from abusive partners is the indictment of a society.

You're right, we should tell them to wait until society is fixed.

paxys3• 5 years ago

A huge chunk of the planet is forced into jobs they don't like to provide for themselves and their families. What's so "dignifying" about a job getting humiliated by entitled customers in retail or waitressing for minimum wage or breaking your body doing hard manual labor? Religious morality is the only reason a much more safe, comfortable and lucrative option like OnlyFans is banned.

radu_floricica• 5 years ago

If someone washes dishes for a living by choice because they love it, good for them. If someone is compelled to in order to feed their kids or leave an abusive partner, then we should all be ashamed of that.

dogma11383• 5 years ago

Women, especially attractive women always had this option, historically it was just usually done through marriage.

Arguably one can claim that marrying upwards isn’t always bad and quite often they are loved and cared for but in the end this is nothing new.

decebalus1• 5 years ago

With all due respect, the fact that anyone is forced into porn to get housing be safe from abusive partners is the indictment of a society.

with all due respect, most people are 'forced' into some sort of labor to get housing or escape abusive partners. It's the way society is built. If it's sex work or not, that's a different story but not by much. Work is work.

throw_m2393393• 5 years ago

With all due respect, the fact that anyone is forced into porn to get housing be safe from abusive partners is the indictment of a society.

I absolutely agree. A society where people have to resort to prostitution in order to keep a roof on their heads FAILED, politically, morally and culturally. In fact, that's exactly how things go in third world countries...

aaron695• 5 years ago

With all due respect your opinion is that of almost all human beings.

From the Taliban to Democrats to Republicans to Socialists to Libertarians. (except the aside about "If someone does OF by choice because they love it, good for them")

So I don't see the relevance.

OP offers a solution to keep the current maxima for these girls. Fight for their well being and ask OF and payment processors to let them stay.

The best actionable plan from your comment I can see is, lets dump these girls in the worst of it so it shames people into improving society.

s1artibartfast• 5 years ago

The "morality police" are the ones who say that women must keep their dignity but live on the street instead.

__MatrixMan__4• 5 years ago

I'm ashamed to participate in a society where anyone has to do work they find degrading. We have the technology to eliminate the you'll-starve-if-you-don't-work dynamic. It's heartbreaking that we don't also have the political will to do so.

TeMPOraL2• 5 years ago

There is some level of dignity that everyone's entitled to. If someone does OF by choice because they love it, good for them. If someone is compelled to in order to feed their kids or leave an abusive partner, then we should all be ashamed of that.

Well, it's still more dignified than telemarketing - the worker, the viewers and the platform all benefit from the transaction, unlike telemarketing call centres, where the worker is paid to screw over people at scale. If you want an indictment of a society, I'd first focus on people being forced into jobs that involve hurting other people.

mzs2• 5 years ago

Can they not setup an account on another for profit service which will commit to verify identity, age, and consent of performers?

pault• 5 years ago

Yes, in the same way that you can set up a video content channel on a site other than YouTube. It's not the hosting, it's the massive amount of traffic and exposure that can't be replicated by another service.

ALittleLight• 5 years ago

I agree that payment processors shouldn't get to say what people do for employment or how people spend their money - but how is it that OnlyFans is keeping women out of abusive relationships? If they couldn't earn money selling pornography they'd have to return to abusive partners?

OnlyFans is only a lucrative option for a small group of people - young attractive women. How is it that every other segment of the population can keep out of abusive relationships and beneath a roof (to the extent they can) without the benefit of OnlyFans?

TchoBeer• 5 years ago

This seems like an unecessarily cynical take. Do you think it's a good thing that people are forced to sell their bodies to survive? Obvious to me that regardless of whether or not onlyfans shuts down, we should have social safety nets so that these people aren't forced to do that.

zapdrive• 5 years ago

Well, maybe they can start working and be productive to the society like the rest of us. Also, the fact that a girl can sustain a life just by taking nudes shows you how much different the both genders actually are. There's no equality. Also why is no one crying about wage gap in porn?

globular-toast• 5 years ago

Firstly, I don't believe you. I'm sure those girls have something to offer society besides showing their bodies for cash. They just don't bother trying because they don't have to.

Second, OnlyFans is an abusive relationship. It's using women during the few years they are attractive enough to exploit the instincts of men. The instant their looks wear off, they're out.

concordDance8• 5 years ago

They're working a job that requires little work for good pay, not sure how this is any more abusive than any other job without a career path.

Note that OnlyFans doesn't kick out the older people, they just get less popular.

jdlyga• 5 years ago

L O fucking L. That's literally what it's for.

skizm• 5 years ago

They’ll still be allowed to put up nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy, the company said Thursday.

bcheung11• 5 years ago

...for how long? They just promised they would be inclusive of adult sex workers only months ago to combat the rumors which apparently were true.

dotcoma• 5 years ago

Why are they shooting themselves in the foot?

Wasn't (soft) porn their business model?

yholio2• 5 years ago

I can understand the business reasons for cleaning up the OnlyFans brand. But I can't, for the life of me, understand why they are killing a cash cow instead of spining it off into a side business.

Clone the full experience on a dedicated site, OnlyFantasy.com, duplicate the whole userbase, and give a simple warning that I can find my favorite stars on another site. In time, the user bases will diverge naturally depending on interests.

Yes, the payment processors will bark at the porn site. Move to a more expensive processor for that site only, pay 5%, 10% fee, it doesn't really matter, it's free money.

tmp_anon_223• 5 years ago

Yes, the payment processors will bark at the porn site. Move to a more expensive processor for that site only, pay 5%, 10% fee, it doesn't really matter, it's free money.

If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, which is kind of a sad state of affairs for free speech, separation of church and state, and policing in general.

smt887• 5 years ago

I totally agree that OnlyFans is a legitimate and ethical site, but let's not kid ourselves about PornHub. It was mostly pirated content with a lot of videos of people being harmed.

adamc4• 5 years ago

But also a business opportunity for someone, with high margins.

jessaustin2• 5 years ago

Eventually this will just drive BTC adoption. Perhaps OF had a reason not to go with this option, but other parties will step up.

throwaway0a5e3• 5 years ago

We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints,

Why wouldn't it just revert back to how it was before all the amateur stuff got monetized over the past 5yr or so.

zdragnar7• 5 years ago

Free speech, separation of church and state has nothing to do with it. Not wanting to be associated with rape, child and revenge porn (variations on non-consent) is all it is.

User submitted content is so much harder to verify facts about (consent in particular) and as long as the user submitted content is sexual in nature, it is legal plutonium.

devrand5• 5 years ago

My understanding is that this industry has way higher than average chargeback/fraud rates, which is really what discourages payment processors/banks from wanting to support them.

yholio2• 5 years ago

Porn sites still exist and they accept credit card payments all the time. The major credit networks do not censor them.

Then, it's simply a question of the fee structure.

recursivedoubts• 5 years ago

the free speech issue has been settled: it is no longer a core value in western societies

it's all who/whom now

i don't like it, but that's the reality

actually_a_dog6• 5 years ago

If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, which is kind of a sad state of affairs for free speech, separation of church and state, and policing in general.

Welcome to the "free(ish) market." As I've said before, people love to say they're in favor of the "free market," until they get one. There is no law preventing any payment processor from accepting clients in the adult content space. They do it simply because of risk and to protect their corporate image.

DantesKite• 5 years ago

Do you think prostitution should be legal?

biztos3• 5 years ago

It really seems weird to me that with all the countries that allow various forms of sex work, payment processing is still such a bottleneck.

As I understand it, independent providers doing 100% legal work in their countries live in terror of their payments being cut off due to the factors mentioned above.

Where is the CoinBase of legal erotica?

mtnGoat• 5 years ago

PH is having problems due to so much "user uploaded" content that they can not verify the identity of the actors contained within. The difference now is that Mastercard is enforcing the rules rather than the US Government which had USC2257 in place for many years with the same requirements. The difference this time is that MC is global(and controls these sites income) and USGov is not, so MC is actually able to enforce this. Adult content sites with their IDs in order(as all US based ones should have already) will have no problem under the new rules. It's not a closing down of the business its actual enforcement of rules that have been on the books for 20+ years by a private entity instead of the lax USGov.

Lets be real, if PH had a way to take monies without having to clean up to save face for the card issuers, it would still be business as usual.

TameAntelope• 5 years ago

I find it utterly fascinating that Reddit is able to maintain such a huge porn collection with relatively little attention. I wish I knew what percentage of submissions were in NSFW subreddits, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the majority.

Maybe it's because they're not trying to make money off of it? I don't think they run ads on NSFW subreddits.

I wonder if there's a market for something like how strip clubs operate -- where the artist pays OnlyFans to stream there, and then the artist collects their income some other way (e.g. Patreon, or just direct cash equivalents). That could in theory keep OnlyFans good with their payment processors, while still keeping this revenue stream at least somewhat open.

commandlinefan• 5 years ago

It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints

Maybe by accelerating adoption and normalization of cryptocurrency.

nemo44x• 5 years ago

Looks like we found the killer app for Bitcoin.

salt-thrower• 5 years ago

It's my understanding that PH is the only adult site with this issue. They got in hot water because of a series of high-profile lawsuits and media pieces about exploitation videos on their platform.

OF would likely not run into this because all of its content creators are verified and can only post videos of themselves or videos they have the rights to; it's not a free-for-all upload fest like PH used to be.

Sebb7679• 5 years ago

If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all.

According to the article, they value themselves over 1 billion. That's not a small company in my books.

stjohnswarts9• 5 years ago

Sounds like some (large & credible) international company with less puritanical execs than those in the USA need to start a new credit card company or payment service

TeeMassive3• 5 years ago

PH got in trouble due to a NYT hit piece and is usual this is usually more of a corporate maneuver than an actual article done in the name of the public interest. See Pewdiepie who got one just about when he got a deal with Disney; surely pure coincidence.

The fact is, MindGeek, who operates PH and the others, is the reason all the corporate porn studios stopped making profits. When was the last time you saw a full length > 90 minutes porn movie produced after ~2010? This used to be a huge industry just as big than Hollywood.

A few days later low and behold the first thing MindGeek does is to stop people from downloading videos and only accept payments for studio made videos.

"Think of the children" is a meme at this point and should raise eyebrows whenever it is raised up as an argument.

joshxyz• 5 years ago

that actually opens up a market for a new payment processor that is capable of dealing with these kind of payments. i honestly wonder if onlyfans explored and exhausted that route thoroughly

thinkingkong• 5 years ago

Stripe is their payment processor and they're _full aware_ of what Onlyfans' content mostly is.

devrand5• 5 years ago

There was a thread on this a year ago [1]. The leading theories seem to be that they use Stripe for SFW content and others (ex. CCBill) for NSFW content.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291790

miohtama6• 5 years ago

MasterCard calls the shot and they were drive into this by Exodus Cry campaign https://mobile.twitter.com/GustavoTurnerX/status/14284408173...

g051051• 5 years ago

Clone the full experience on a dedicated site, OnlyFantasy.com

You are, absolutely, a genius.

qzw3• 5 years ago

Even more so if the GP owns the OnlyFantasy domain.

neurostimulant• 5 years ago

Probably impossible as someone mentioned it might be due to FOSTA-SESTA which is intended to curb online sex work, which is arguably what onlyfans currently enabled right now. They probably determined it's too risky to continue.

miohtama6• 5 years ago

Here are the details how MasterCard got into the censorship business https://mobile.twitter.com/GustavoTurnerX/status/14284408173...

OTOH OnlyFans could have complied, and the requirements are not impossible, though harsh.

noobermin3• 5 years ago

What other brand do they have?

Also, there seriously needs to be a reckoning with the payment processor issue, somehow.

collegeburner• 5 years ago

Exactly, you can't clean up the OF brand because its brand as it is commonly known is 18 to 30yr olds selling nudes. And this seems to be its big customer demographic. There is no significant "other brand" to split off. If it wants to start a Patreon competitor with the same backend fine, but that's a new brand. It's literally a meme among younger people: "oh yeah that OF charge it's a cooking class" or "yoga sessions" or some shit. This is the Colgate Dinner problem: you can't apply a toothpaste brand to frozen food, you can't apply an amateur porn brand to patreon stuff. If i'm a chick trying to sell some non-porn subscription content I cannot use that brand because everyone will think it is porn and write me off as another thot.

suifbwish2• 5 years ago

Once you reach a certain size and payment processors are barking at your content, the answer becomes: “start your own payment processor” an amusing side note is today I learned onlyfans didn’t just host people’s porn videos.

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

You will discover new Eastern European "friends" who will "discourage" you from becoming an adult-services payment processor. That entire market is cornered, and they don't like to share.

tdeck• 5 years ago

It's especially odd given that their parent company already owns an explicit porn site called MyFreeCams.

ehsankia• 5 years ago

It seemed like they were gonna do that. They launched OFTV which was a non-nude platform, which could get on Apple/Google app stores. That was very recently too. Then suddenly this news comes out. Very strange...

kondro3• 5 years ago

In these cases, it's usually not the payment processors' call.

Visa & Mastercard are happy to ban an entire company from their platform (see PornHub).

creatonez• 5 years ago

Clone the full experience on a dedicated site, OnlyFantasy.com, duplicate the whole userbase, and give a simple warning that I can find my favorite stars on another site. In time, the user bases will diverge naturally depending on interests.

This is exactly what Gfycat did. They took the same backend infrastructure, made it into a porn site (Redgifs), and moved all the porn gifs on Gfycat over to the new site.

isatty2• 5 years ago

So nobody learnt anything from whatever Tumblr pulled. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Amazing.

eykanal• 5 years ago

From the comments here, it sounds like the main issue is payment processors needing to accommodate "vice laws" or something. Can someone explain why OnlyFans can't simply use non-US payment processors to get around this? My understanding is that many European countries are much less concerned with vice than the US.

temp20210816• 5 years ago

Problem with these sites is that how do you ensure that everything is voluntary? You might end up making money for a pimp or human trafficking group.

This is a real concern especially on the cam content. It’s quite tempting business for some pimp on low-income country to get house, few cameras and put ladies to work.

Kind of same issues with the porn in general, but I assume there’s lots of paperwork happening on background for large production companies.

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

Why is Bloomberg the primary source for this? OnlyFans is too cowardly to make a press release?

Anyway, it seems like OF is about to accomplish an epic maneuver: raise money at a $1 billion valuation based on a product you just cancelled.

orliesaurus2• 5 years ago

Unexpected.

perlgeek• 5 years ago

Starting in October, the company will prohibit creators from posting material with sexually explicit conduct on its website [...]. They’ll still be allowed to put up nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy.

So nude is OK but it may not sexually explicit?

That seems like a very fine line to walk, with much associated drama.

stronglikedan• 5 years ago

It's been a pretty well established line with the MPAA for decades, so they can likely use that standard out of the box.

_trampeltier• 5 years ago

There was even a AskHN question here a while ago (1..3 years) from somebody ot of this kind of business. A part of the discussion was also how OnlyFans just can do it. The fall of Wirecard (and new owner) was a problem for Pornhub last year. I the most early case I know was Fetlife .. it had been over 10 years now..

Grakel• 5 years ago

McDonald's to stop selling burgers and fries.

onionisafruit• 5 years ago

I think this is a rule to keep payment processors happy that won't be enforced. How are they going to find these sexually explicit videos among all the nude videos they still allow? Maybe they have software that can distinguish between a nude video and a sexually explicit nude video. If not they need to either review videos that are posted or rely on users to report sexually explicit videos. I doubt they want to manually review all uploaded videos, so that leaves user reports. Who is going to report an onlyfans account they subscribe to for posting an explicit video? Probably nobody.

tibbon• 5 years ago

So uhh... time to raise some funds and launch a crypto-payments version of OF?

stevenicr5• 5 years ago

Thinking I might build a version or two of this. If someone's raising money, maybe we should partner on it. I'd need help with ads / marketing for this kind of scale.. the other parts shouldn't be a problem.

raitom• 5 years ago

Congrats on making the dumbest business decision ever made!

lucymort2• 5 years ago

We're building an alternative to OnlyFans! And we're hiring a Head of Engineering and a Senior Engineer!

https://angel.co/l/2vyMwb https://angel.co/l/2vA8yr

HMU lucy@sunroom.so

ScionOfDesign2• 5 years ago

I'm curious, what cloud or SaaS solutions are your company using? Many of the cloud solutions I've looked at explicitly forbid pornographic, explicit, or 'obscene' content. Do you self-host instead?

Atlassian Cloud, for example, forbids hosting any of that sort of content on their services, which could make development difficult. With their server subscriptions gone, this is even more of an issue.

Places like Azure will host the content internally, but don't allow you to share the content publicly in any way that ties it back to them. Such as sharing an explicit image on OneDrive or hosting a website that pings back to their IP space.

How do you get around these challenges in development?

moron4hire• 5 years ago

Wait, so what are they going to do without their only source of revenue? I was pretty well under the impression that OF pretty much only hosted camgirl accounts. I mean, other than the token "thought influencers" they probably bought to try to give themselves a glimmer of legitimacy. It's so bad that other social media sites (well, TikTok, I don't know about others) completely ban mention of OnlyFans under the assumption it's just porn.

lucymort2• 5 years ago

We're building an alternative to OnlyFans! And we're hiring a Head of Engineering and a Senior Engineer.

https://angel.co/l/2vyMwb https://angel.co/l/2vA8yr

HMU lucy@sunroom.so

cbdumas3• 5 years ago

A few comments here are drawing a parallel between tech companies shutting down Gab (temporarily) and payment processing companies forcing this move from OnlyFans (which from the outside looking in appears tantamount to shutting them down). Regardless of how you perceive the two specific cases, I think they make people uncomfortable because in both cases they demonstrate the power that large tech platforms have over law-abiding companies.

It seems to me that the government needs to take some of that power back from tech companies by clearly delineating which services can and cannot be refused and in what circumstances. For instance, I think it is perfectly right for Google to remove Gab from their app store if they wish, but I think it would be wrong if Gab was refused internet service by their ISP, for example. Similarly, as we transition to a cashless world I think there need to be limits on the authority that payment processors can exercise over which businesses are allowed to receive payments and which are not.

standardUser2• 5 years ago

I genuinely don't understand. If PornHub and Chaturbate can accept major credit cards for explicit sexual material, why can't OnlyFans?

bitwize2• 5 years ago

OnlyFans to block profit starting in October

ftfy

albertTJames• 5 years ago

(Conservative ∩ Woke) == {e : e ∊ (bland ⋃ tedious)}

meltedcapacitor• 5 years ago

This is asking for a partnership with shopify: onlyfans could automatically generate a t-shirt/coffee cup store on shopify and a t-shirt fulfillment partner, and creators could perform for fans who buy a lot of t-shirts ("buy 3 t-shirts and I'll take off mine for you!") with smooth bidirectional API integration etc. Card processors can't ban all these people buying t-shirts.

throwaway8358• 5 years ago

With all the focus on "local" now, maybe society just needs to go back to good ol' fashioned red light districts with brothels where Johns can make cash payments to the Madams that credit card companies and Apple/Google Pay can't block. Instead of paying with a credit card to see pixelated computer-screen boobies that are 3000 miles away, maybe just go to a local "gentleman's club" and see actual in-the-flesh nude women or something, ya know?

drummer• 5 years ago

This is why we need fully private and untraceable cryptocurrencies like monero, pirate chain and mobilecoin. Someone should tell the people at onlyfans.

thepasswordis2• 5 years ago

Good.

Onlyfans is extremely exploitative, and part of the business model is to groom underage girls into doing pornography. There have been many news reports of only fans ignoring reports that underage girls are selling pornography of themselves on their website; something which onlyfans profits off of.

They are pimps, and seem to be okay with pimping out children and encouraging children to enter the sex trade. I hope that some of them end up in prison.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57255983.amp

Minor49er• 5 years ago

Quite a sad state that we're in when this true and insightful comment has been voted to the bottom of the entire reply section

rubyist5eva• 5 years ago

I have zero sympathy.

MelvinButtsESQ2• 5 years ago

What an absolute shame. Not particularly because I use OF, but because they feel the need to do this, due to public pressure, pressure from banks, etc. When are we going to stop moral policing (literally via power of the state and figuratively) consensual adult activities?

fnord77• 5 years ago

is this like Ford saying they're going to stop making vehicles?

systematical• 5 years ago

Isn't that the point of their site?

MelvinButtsESQ2• 5 years ago

Sex work is legitimate work. They should not be shame and pushed to the fringes as we do here in the US, both by power of state and morality. I cringe at the number of people, mostly women of course, who are going to lose their livelihood because of "virtual Karens" imposing THEIR moral beliefs on others via power of the state.

boraturan• 5 years ago

just create your next OnlyFans with Alvin5.com

chadlavi• 5 years ago

What's next, twitch banning gaming?

mkl95• 5 years ago

Porn app bans porn. Serious onion vibes

Barrin92• 5 years ago

Absolutely terrible that companies feel the need to drop sex workers, many of whom depend on the platform to make a living.

Don't even blame onlyfans because it's the demands of banks and VCs in this case and society at large who still treat sex workers like some kind of caste of undesirables they don't want to be associated with.

Giorgi2• 5 years ago

OF will probably die off and clone will emerge in the country that US can't pressure into complying. Like it happened with torrent trackers.

throwaway888abc• 5 years ago

Let's make TrueFans ?

andy_ppp5• 5 years ago

Does anyone else here feel the Onlyfans phenomenon is just exploiting sad lonely men who’d be better off leaving the house, doing some exercise and trying to eat healthier and build their IRL social networks?

This whole cam-girls making a fortune this way seems somehow more dishonest than normal porn to me, maybe because it’s about these guys (who can never have relationships with these women) building a personal and intimate relationship as one of her “fans”. I almost see this as being like gambling where people need to acknowledge maybe how powerful sex is and being a technology that should be regulated similarly.

I wonder if nobody calls out this exploitation because society keeps suggesting that all men are privileged, which is definitely not true for at least 60% of the male population.

Anyway I’ll probably get downvoted for this but these double standards have been irritating me for a while :-)

perardi7• 5 years ago

Well among other things: way to utterly and entirely ignore the LGBT creators on there who are making money but also creating erotic content for their communities.

andy_ppp5• 5 years ago

It is a correct reading that my comment didn’t make assumptions about those creators or communities. That’s because it was about something else, that I think consuming this kind of porn is particularly bad because it is largely lonely low status men obsessing about and giving money to rich powerful women on OnlyFans. I find it interesting to point out there might be an unfavourable power dynamic here in the opposite way to how it usually occurs within our society.

after_care• 5 years ago

I suspect the economics of OnlyFans is similar to the economics of gambling, loot boxes, and heroin. 20% of the users are generating 80% of the revenue. People can form an unhealthy relationship to anything, but there’s probably a lot of people getting real enjoyment out of OnlyFans without it causing personal problems.

adamcharnock5• 5 years ago

Edit: as has been pointed out, I’ve misrepresented the parent comment. It’s late here, my apologies.

There seem to be a lot of assumptions here that I don’t agree with. So perhaps this comment isn’t for me, in which case feel free to ignore the following.

People seem to add so many values into the mix when it comes to sex work. If these old lonely people paid carers to visit them at home, would that be somehow different? Are these old lonely people somehow exploited because there is sex involved? If they cannot make rational choices because sex is involved then I’d say that is the problem.

Also, where does being able to “have” someone figure into any of this? There is no ‘you must be at least this hot to enter’ scale, people get together for all kinds of reasons. Plus, “have” sounds a lot like possession of someone, which I think we all think is bad? Right?

I think there are a lot of values encoded in the above comment, but I also know it wasn’t intended negatively.

andy_ppp5• 5 years ago

1. I didn’t say old, maybe you misread?

2. I think I’m suggesting some men (the most obsessive and biggest spenders?) would use onlyfans instead of having a relationship. I’m not saying it’s right that a proportion of men become obsessive but it happens right?

3. I’d say a lot of men don’t make rational choices about sex.

jfup3• 5 years ago

where does being able to “have” someone figure into any of this?

The GP said "have relationships with these women", not "have these women".

ayngg• 5 years ago

It is at the intersection of pornography and parasocial online relationships (seen in Youtube, Twitch and other influencers), both extremely profitable. Looking at some of the revenue breakdowns the fees to message are just as significant as subscription costs.

On average I don't think it is particularly healthy to replace real social/ sexual relationships with parasocial ones and I think that is the primary use for these services. For the most part they lack real meaningful intimacy which is a significant benefit that real relationships provide. I don't think many who maintain healthy social and romantic relationships are the majority of users of the platform.

pcbro141• 5 years ago

Society is incredibly gynocentric. Few journalists have any interest in how the dating apps exploit lonely men either (by upselling them boosts, superlikes, gold, platinum, and other memberships that the platforms know won't do much to help the average guy on there).

Male mental health is ignored a lot and it's sad.

throwaway3067445• 5 years ago

Male mental health is ignored a lot and it's sad.

Until it's dangerous. Some intervention between sad and shooter would serve society well.

dhanna• 5 years ago

Clearly you don’t use onlyfans lmao. It’s just porn dude.

SilverRed4• 5 years ago

It's clearly not "just porn" or it would have no value at all since there is unlimited free content. It seems like the entire value the platform provides is some kind of social interaction with the content creators.

throwthroyaboat• 5 years ago

I agree with your general premise it's exploiting loneliness and the clients aren't always engaging in these things in a healthy way (see also, parasocial relationships with streamers, etc). But I'm not sure if there is any targeted regulation that would actually achieve harm reduction. Banning it will just send it underground and make it more dangerous for the participants, and harder for people to seek help. Maybe tax it and then re-invest the proceeds into the mental health?

noobermin3• 5 years ago

Question, what is the open source/decentralized alternative for these? Just cryptocurrency? The unfortunate part of crypto I think for the public is that it's highly volatile and only used by people who want to speculate with it.

It feels like the only way to solve the payment processor issue is to somehow have a change to US laws that no longer criminalize sex work.

AzzieElbab2• 5 years ago

OF should complain to ftc or whoever that the payment processors bullying disproportionally effects women and lgbtq community. I am not being sarcastic

midrus• 5 years ago

Is it today April 1st in any part of the world I'm not aware?

GuB-42• 5 years ago

In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and the continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines

So, they are trying to get inclusive by excluding most of their community...

I understand it is bullshit and the only reason they do it is because porn is a difficult investment, with a lot of credit card fraud and limited opportunities for partnership. But still, OnlyFans made a name for itself with porn, and even managed the impressive feat of staying mostly clean regarding abuse and copyright infringement.

It is a difficult niche to fit in, but by abandoning it, they will compete with everyone else, including Google, Facebook, etc... and I don't think they will stand a chance. It is like, say, a shop that sells craft beer next to Walmart. Craft beer suppliers may be unreliable, have limited stock, with wild variation in quality, etc... it is much easier to deal with large industrial breweries, but if you stop selling craft beer because it is too hard, people will not buy your new, "guaranteed profit" industrial beer, they will go to Walmart, because Walmart if bigger and can negotiate lower prices, and people can get their beers with their groceries. The only reason the craft beer shop can make money is because they do the kind of thing Walmart refuses to do.

throw_m2393393• 5 years ago

"Diversity" and "inclusivity" are weasel words, they mean absolutely nothing when it comes to corporate speech, it's something you throw in a PR statement to appeal to young people who vote left and political pundits, nothing more.

dbg31415• 5 years ago

"History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes."

Prediction:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38963007

Also relevant... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_o8vYUU-jo

IdontRememberIt2• 5 years ago

CC processing business is hold by 2 American companies. When they warn you (through your CC acquirer), you have zero negotiation power. Comply or die.

You can use proxies if you are a small company. But at onlyFans' level, the solutions are limited.

PS: By experience, I can also confirm that most of the CC acquirers evaluate your business not on its legality but on its morality.

PS2: With mandatory 3DS2, the excuse of high fraud/complains rates (which were true 10 years ago) does not make sense anymore.

majani2• 5 years ago

The real reason is probably that "adult Patreon" probably isn't a sustainable business model. The incentive for famous influencers to scam users with photos and videos that are only technically nude is just too high, and that will result in charge backs galore.

SamEdosa• 5 years ago

More money for Twitter. I would venture to say Twitter has more sexually explicit content then OnlyFans.

meeshoo• 5 years ago

Isn't it funny how porn-related news generate such great interest and such fiery intellectual debates on HN?

ChildOfChaos• 5 years ago

So they are shutting down the site?

murphyslab• 5 years ago

At the end of July I started noticing odd ads for that site while browsing reddit on mobile. Out of curiosity, I started collecting screenshots of the ads. They have been trying to pivot for a little while now:

https://i.imgur.com/Kh6zMga.png

newbamboo• 5 years ago

If it can happen to porn it can happen to crypto. History is a pendulum. Those who believe otherwise may be right, but nobody is right forever.

rednerrus• 5 years ago

Isn't this the case for Cum Rocket?!?

booleandilemma• 5 years ago

Wow, this is like if Apple said they were going to stop making iPhones.

k12sosse• 5 years ago

Especially if you consider that you could just web search for free iPhones, ask your friends older brother to go buy some iPhones for you from the corner store, or work on your appearance and conversational skills and go get someone to give you a free iPhone IRL.

I never understood this subscriber minded concept of "Porn as a Service". Back in my day we'd just steal our dad's iPhone and share it among friends (assuming everyone took care of the iPhone and didn't spill any liquids on it). Even in the 80s and 90s you could just throw a rock and there was a 50% chance it'd land on an iPhone. It's even easier now, there's entire websites dedicated to hoarding images and videos of iPhones on various hosting sites. From an access-to-iPhone perspective, this is non-news. From a "MUH RIGHTS" perspective, I get why people are upset, but you also gotta see it from the billing perspective. It's their payment processing and they'll do with it what they want. But I mean ccBill exists and offers rates of 10-15%.. just earn less, I guess.

taurath• 5 years ago

The marketplace desperately needs payment processors that handle adult content.

Arguments against it scale down to "because there is exploitation, we shouldn't have any porn". This is the drug war mentality. Guess where it leads

devwastaken• 5 years ago

Reason for crypto right here. They're not going to stop offering payment processing to crypto sites.

dang• 5 years ago

This thread has 1300+ comments; to see the rest, click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274&p=4

(Comments like this will go away when we turn off pagination. Sorry for the annoyance.)

yalogin• 5 years ago

I actually thought it was a porn site just like the many other streaming video sites. If the founder had non-porn consumer app ambitions, why not just clone it and form another site? They are just giving until October for some other app to fill the void. I am sure pornhub or someone will jump in and take their money.

rodarmor• 5 years ago

Fortunately, if you're feeling entrepreneurial, you can spin up an Agora* instance and start selling whatever you want for Lightning Payments.

* https://github.com/agora-org/agora/

greyivy2• 5 years ago

This is not accessible to 90% of SWers, and if it is, it will not earn them a living.

busymom02• 5 years ago

Payment processors are totally cool with exploitation of kids with Cuties but lord forbid if consensual adults want to share sexual content, then that's a problem!

xwdv• 5 years ago

Wow wow wow, this is incredible for startups who were trying to get in this space but were having a tough time competing with OnlyFans. It will be a transfer of wealth.

hakube• 5 years ago

They're done.

neonihil• 5 years ago

Aha, so OnlyFans is closing business. Sweet.

Anybody interested in building a clone and taking over of their core business?

greyivy2• 5 years ago

Considering thousands and thousands of people will lose their only source of income, this is far from "sweet". Please stay far away from the industry if you lack such basic empathy.

overip• 5 years ago

OnlyFans going out of business in November.

alvah• 5 years ago

I haven't fact-checked, but this OF creator posted screenshots of her chat with OF support denying the Bloomberg article & stating sexually explicit stills and videos will still be allowed: https://mobile.twitter.com/ShyCutieMFC/status/14285024291510...

Waterluvian• 5 years ago

Is this the terminal stage of a tech startup?

Your entire business model was crushed by payment companies so you pivot in whatever direction you think you can.

nobody0• 5 years ago

When they cross the river, they burn the bridge.

vmception• 5 years ago

OnlyFans is going to pivot from streamers pretending to fuck themselves to VCs actually fucking themselves

rzz3• 5 years ago

What? This is the only reason people use onlyfans period…

graderjs• 5 years ago

The terrible thing is this probably pushes performers to more predatory platforms / aggregators.

I bet this move could somehow be traced to machinations from the big porn industry players. I think if people want to make money doing this stuff and they're legally of age in a place they do it, and if they're not hurting anyone, then you shouldn't get in their way. If it's a free choice to engage in it and they are not trafficed nor coerced nor debt trapped, it should be a way that people can access to generate income or express themselves is that if that's what they choose.

I've heard of onlyfans but I've never even seen any content on there and the screenshots I've seen have just been sort of racy but not explicit and i don't know anything about the background of this decision, but... just in general I think it's easy and useful to frame it from the point of view of freedom of expression and commerce versus a moral panic or crackdown on independent content creators who are empowering themselves with content in a market that pays premiums and they can achieve a better standard of life than by doing other things, and it's better than them working at the behest of or in contract to someone else. So from that point of view I think it's a great thing that people could do this (like uber for racy content or if you want to take it to the extreme: Uber for explicit content) and it's really sad that this platform seems to now be disallowing that I think to the great harm and detriment of all the people who could formerly freely engaged in making their money that way.

brodouevencode• 5 years ago

It speaks volumes that this post, only 7 hours old at this point, is one of the most commented on, voted on posts within recent history.

cphoover3• 5 years ago

Why not use something like plaid and then do direct bank transfers rather than use credit cards. You could also accept cryptocurrencies. This decision will kill their business

ashtonkem3• 5 years ago

Might as well just close up shop tomorrow; they’d keep more money that way rather than spending it all on servers and salary.

intellix• 5 years ago

I didn't even know that OnlyFans had non-porn content but I guess the name makes sense. I feel like their brand is known for porn and if it's gone the name is too tainted to succeed in anything else.

anovikov• 5 years ago

This is good because it will mean an upsurge of competitors. I personally know several.

In general, internet is mostly about porn or sex (Tinder, Facebook which is really for hookups when it's not for paid political propaganda), or for illegal activity (fintech, darknets) or for scam (adtech, freelance sites). I wonder what people who opt for "none of the above" are thinking.

jhanschoo• 5 years ago

It seems to me that the adult industry in the US is pigeonholed into that, and it seems to me that taboo is a factor in it. In comparison, Japan's DMM is primarily known for its adult products, but is also very well diversified.

holoduke• 5 years ago

American absurdity. Selling violence and killing off thousands of people with their arms is no big deal, but a bit of nudity is.

mikequinlan• 5 years ago

The BBC claims that this is due to an investigation it did.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865

rambojazz• 5 years ago

I always thought that was their entire business model.

antender• 5 years ago

Basically, the site is rebranding as OnlyBans :)

Folcon• 5 years ago

I may be being very naive here, so it would be great for someone to point out where I'm missing a trick, but if they make $2 billion in revenue and keep 20% of that, why don't they found or buy a small bank? I mean granted it's not their core business area, but it's a huge risk factor for them, so an acquisition doesn't seem out of the question to mitigate that risk...

According to here[0], banks need approx $20 million in startup capital. Now I don't know what onlyfan's costs are, but they seem to be sitting on a lot more than that or alternatively they could get financing.

Is there a reason this isn't a direction they've explored? The fact that they've not swapped to a more expensive payment provider implies that it's not a good option, but that may be a simpler solution, or they could provide a competitive option in this space?

- [0]: https://howtostartanllc.com/business-ideas/bank

firloop• 5 years ago

Likely, the restrictions are coming at the card network level rather than the bank level. Building a Visa/Mastercard network is a much harder proposition than just buying a bank, especially as it pertains to consumer distribution.

onlyfansfan• 5 years ago

A question to you entrepreneurial types.

Why does an globally established and growing company with a proven business model want to raise a billion dollar investment?

It's money they'll have to pay back with interest and I assume there would be other strings attached (like the high risk implied by the title of this article). How is possibly better than organic growth at this point where they are probably close to market saturation (in the sense that further exponential growth is implausible)?

rawoke083600• 5 years ago

Lol i thought that was OnlyFans primary focus ??

lightwave25• 5 years ago

But today's not April 1st and the source is not The Onion. I don't understand.

kwonkicker• 5 years ago

Only thing that can compete with this is if pornhub decided to ban porn.

swat535• 5 years ago

The everlasting war against the human naked body continues.

I genuinely struggle to understand the obsession of these payment processors have to block services that focus on displaying the naked human form. Are we as a species so despicable that a nipple offends us? We are all born naked and are essentially part of the larger ecosystem on this planet.

Sure, I could understand the high chargeback rates argument , but then again, huge Bahamuts like MC and Visa can surely absorb the cost here.

These systems provide a safe channel for sex workers to profit _directly_ from their services and yet here we have society pushing them to an unsafe alley to profit.

I hope the hypocrisy of western nations supporting the sexual liberation of women whilst cracking down on their ability to do as they please with their bodies should not go unnoticed .

The extreme religious institutions and people supporting these policies should go down in history as villains.

I sincerely hope that future generations drive change and that one day we can look back at this time and chuckle.

hakfoo• 5 years ago

The thing I never understood:

The argument seems to be that "our payment partners don't like explicit content". I think the same excuse was thrown around for Tumblr's porn ban too.

* If this was a single (or small number of) player(s) objecting, why aren't they being competed around? Any payment platform that refuses to service the porn industry is, by its very nature, leaving money on the table.

* Again, if we're dealing with a centralized point of objection, I could see "name and shame" pushback being very effective. Imagine the backlash from both porn enthusiasts and libertarians closing their accounts if they said "It's XYZ Bank, they don't want you buying pornography."

* The worst-case scenario I could imagine is that it's at the card-brand level, driven by non-US/EU regulations. They can switch from (for example) Stripe to Braintree to Auth.net, but they can't escape Visa and Mastercard so easily. They might feel the need to regulate because it's required as a condition of market entry in, say, China or the Middle East.

But that still opens the door for domestic-focused alternatives (ACH? The old ATM-centric debit card networks?) In fact, in today's politically charged environment, I could see momentum to explicitly develop a payment product designed for "Western Sensibilites and Values" with an explicit "Hell no, it doesn't work in Beijing/Moscow/Baghdad" message. Suddenly, supporting pornography is a patriotic endeavour that you can use to demand special treatment and subsidy.

* Why now, when they're trying to go public? It's not like people suddenly woke up and said "OnlyFans had PORN?" If they maintained their relationships with their payment processors until now, it's not like there's a sudden, earth shattering revelation here.

I'm wondering if maybe the truth is less dramatic and grand. The angle I could see is that a hypothetical "OnlyFans - Porn" is a lower merchant risk profile than "OF as it stands". The high merchant fees for that industry are a well-established cost centre. If they could say "we slashed our merchant fees nn%" it looks good while preening the balance sheet for the IPO. However, I'm skeptical if that's the case-- any sort of "digital video delivery" and "subscription service" are still pretty high risk merchant types. I'd also think it's still less of a revenue risk to just split the business: a high-fee porn-only site and a cheaper-to-operate non-porn site, using shared technology.

OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October

Related Stories