> [About SV] An observer might note that all of these companies are dominated by men, in an industry dominated by men, tightly interwoven with a venture capital industry that is super-dominated by men. So it’s curious why none of these men have shown any interest in addressing the massive and lucrative sex work industry that overwhelmingly serves, well, men; until you consider who pays the real costs of that industry’s brokenness: women.
It's such a primitive and toxic line of thinking. The real explanation is that SV doesn't care about the plight of porn actresses not because they're women, but because people in general mostly care about themselves and their closest ones only. Just see that the SV also doesn't care about the plight of rare earth miners (which SV needs for their electronics), even though they're mostly men. I.e. the gender is not a factor here, and yet article authors try very hard to make it look like it is.
This feminist take was definitely uncalled for in this article. The author's bias about how the women, _who are actually getting monetarily compensated_, are the victims completely misses the costs to the purchasers, who are almost all men, in terms of their money and the neurologic changes that such sex work consumption has. Having the "algorithm" suggesting and enticing these men back to buy more subscriptions / pics or however it works on these things is just as much a negative side effect as the women experience in social stigma.
Wow. Are you really saying that the men who consume porn are equally victimized as actual sex workers, because of an algorithm?
In the sense that algorithms do nudge our behaviour in insidious ways, addicted consumers of porn can be seen as victims of a sort. But, to suggest that the social stigma associated with porn usage is equal, much less anywhere near approaching, or in the same order of magnitude of the social stigma that sex workers face, is just so incredibly wrong.
> The author's bias about how the women, _who are actually getting monetarily compensated_, are the victims
Being monetarily compensated doesn't prevent being a victim, which is the basis of all labor protection legislation beyond “workers must get paid at least a token amount”.
No one put a gun to that guy's head, society won't even ask him any questions about nor assume what he does in his personal time, whereas that same politeness doesn't extend to sex workers. That's just the tip of the iceberg as far as the difference between these two goes, as I see it
Not really? I can't think of the last time a prominent newspaper named & shamed a random working man for spending money on porn, whereas that happened with the NY Post and a paramedic with an onlyfans just last week. Your view of reality is wildly distorted.
> It's such a primitive and toxic line of thinking
its especially a nonsense argument when you note that porn is one of the few industries with a huge pay gap - and in favor of women. its so significant that top tier actresses pay scale has a floor that is higher than the ceiling of the equivalent male talent.
Yeah it's such a dumb argument. The obvious explanation is that all of those companies are ad supported, and advertisers don't want to advertise next to porn. If advertisers suddenly wanted to advertise on porn pages, how many seconds do you think it would take for FB to change that policy? But let's pretend it's because they're men.
Welcome to 2020 where identity politics is the name of the game. It seems everything these days can be explained based on your race/gender and yet this is supposedly the most "woke" time ever. Cue the downvotes.
I want you to know that any downvotes might have less to do with 2020 or identity politics and more so your sloppy style of conversation. Throwing out a wildly undifferentiated blanket statement and ending on a passive aggressive "cue the downvotes" is bad content in my opinion.
It enjoy being subjected to different views. I hope we can uphold a certain standard for expressing them around here.
SV doesn’t care about porn, because it’s a bad PR, at least for now. There’s no “Larry Flynt” kind of guy there, that would like to move it forward. Or have courage to fight for it.
Other then reputation nightmare of doing that kind of business, most of SV would jump in without hesitation. There’s shit tone of money in it, worth of grabbing for them... :)
You may be right, but it seems plausible that men are also much less likely to understand the potential for and existence of abuse that happens to women in the porn industry.
So it may not be that they don't care about women. Simply that they don't understand and recognize the harm to women.
I think that the harm, abuse, maiming and occasional deaths happening to millions of factory workers is well understood. However we are doing very little to seriously address it. I haven’t heard any stories of woman loosing their arms, legs, or lives shooting porn in the porn industry. Have you?
I think that the argument is that male tech workers consume porn as much as other men and therefore solving issues of porn industry could be solving issues they have too. E.g. selfishness of tech males should lead them to care about porn.
Your contra argument implicitly assumes that tech makes are special kind of males that don't use porn.
Essential issue isn't about solving their problems. Essential issue is about making them more money. Which opportunity makes them the largest amount of money, with the least amount of risk to their investment?
Porn doesn't compare favorably to their other opportunities. Full Stop.
If it did compare favorably, they would be putting money and resources in porn.
The argument holds no water and it is pretty disgusting of this uber-for-porn pimp to pretend he is doing good.
Porn is like weed. If you want to consume it ethically you need to verify your sources. These cam sites have their own serious exploitation issues that are completely being ignored.
If you go on reddit you can find many threads discussing cam girls who are suspected to either be underage or be literal sex slaves.
There are actual ethical porn producers of various flavours (also featured on HN quite a few times). Onlyfans is not one of them.
Porn always reminds me of other classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown. They actively fear monger people out of action so no real progress is made. It prevents the best coders and business people from working on these problems and leaves a void for seedy people to fill. This is a human problem and I think largely a problem derivative of manipulative overthinking and over empathy.
I see this article as more of an interesting take on how wealthy Silicon Valley men perceive each other. My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. Banks created that paradigm so of course it would be difficult for any VC firm to justify using non-fiat currency to enrich themselves. To apply gender to this and to arbitrarily add to the list of problems that men created is dubious at best.
If you want tech to create solutions for sex, the sex industry, and sex workers at large then people need to change. Already there are people on this thread attempting to correlate what I assume is BDSM to pedophilia, and echoing the voices I mentioned earlier. Protecting sex workers or even sex enthusiasts will always be an iterative game that requires constant attention. The worst thing we can do is to continue to ignore it and apply moralistic language from either end of the spectrum to the problem.
Some people might really enjoy a fallacy like action is inaction here, which is telling.
> classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion.
I think this is a pretty american centric point of view. These debates don't have anywhere near the same back and forth in other countries (thinking of canada in particular) that they do in USA.
I imagine how taboo porn is is also very much a cultural phenomenon that varries a lot place to place.
The abortion debate still happens (at varying intensities and varying degrees of public view) in much of Europe.
The gun control debate is largely settled but I suspect it will start up quite loudly if the EU ever tries to normalize gun laws across member states. The difference between say, the Netherlands (low ownership, very hard to get a license), Austria (moderately regulated and lots of unlicensed ownership), and Finland (very high ownership rate but strictly regulated) is probably wider than any US state, because the US constitution has been interpreted to set a fairly high bar for any regulation.
> My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards.
Most porn can be bought with credit cards, at least in the USA. Mainstream payment processing companies like stripe may not be willing to do it but if you go try to buy (legal) porn right now with a credit card you will be able to do it.
You could argue the merits of the website (I am not a member) but at the end of the day if you can only use BitCoin or a bank account then the policies have failed businesses, consumers, and content creators.
I don't know where the lines lie for decency in credit card payments or what they consider acceptable risk, but I would point back to my original assertion. If you cannot pay the best coders, the best business people, then those worries will not be solved.
A lot of working girls accept credit cards with "discreet billing" (IT/Computer services etc), and almost all accept Venmo/Square Cash/PayPal, all of which get filled by credit or debit cards. Some even refuse to set an appointment without paying a deposit online.
There's a spectrum with this.. some banks will allow CC processing for a porn biz.. some get creative with how they label things... some will even get into details about types of content maybe..
but it's not as easy as mainstream, and often much more expensive to process and in some cases to even sign up.
Last I looked into ccBill - they were collecting an extra 2 grand up front payment to enable process mastercard.
These systems are taking advantage of niche classes imho.
There is also the threat of getting deplatformed / de-processed? quickly because bad PR - something that a local hardware store would not be worried about.
It's harder to find places to work with you, it's more expensive, and easier to loose your ability to get paid. Sometimes there are things like operation chokepoint that try to make it near impossible for a small independent operator to go out on her own.
> My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards.
Hmm, the 3 adult shops I pass on the way into work beg to differ. You can buy anything from lingerie, to lube (with CBD Oil!), videos, handcuffs, ball gags... You can get any of this stuff online too.
The only place where you might struggle to use Visa cards for sex is on sites that have been busted with illegal content.
If performers could actually buy food and shelter with digital currency, rather than having to go through an exchange with wildly oscillating prices from one day to the next, I reckon they would switch very quickly. But they can’t, so they won’t.
> The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown
I really don't think this is accurate analysis of abortion debate in USA. First, I am not even sure what difference should the middle require in your analysis.
What progress on abortion would you expect to happen had advocates stopped talking?
I remember buying porn with CCBill (from my experience, a payment company for porn and shareware) many years ago. I don’t remember there ever being a time when there was a problem purchasing porn.
> Porn always reminds me of other classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown.
Conservatives and progressives/liberals have completely different world views:
Precisely. The culture of our main groups is what drives the loud voices. In the end, American culture is useless for solving these kind of problems, at least for the time being.
There are people who buy into politics but not culture though (eg: it is possible for one to be politically liberal but then be more culturally free rather than culturally constrained). These people, in the sense of sex work and the porn industry may be able to produce viable solutions and products, but they'd constantly be on the defensive against both political cultures.
OnlyFans seems to have disrupted the porn industry in an ethical way I think. Profit obviously isn't always closely aligned with ethics, but being ethical is usually a good idea all other things being equal. People are more likely to support your company if they think you behave ethically (it helps if they believe in your mission), and if you have a history of acting honestly you can maybe derive gains from the fact that your customers may trust you more.
Who said disrupt? I certainly didn't. That said, tech (not Silicon Valley) could develop open methods for verification or DRM that could be useful in solving the problems people are talking about.
Tech isn't all about making money. Silicon Valley probably is.
"Everything in life is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power."
I think the debate is not really about porn, but people's sense of justice, cheating, deserving things or not etc.
Some feel like porn gives unearned satisfaction to young men, a virtual substitute they don't have to work for. The bitter other side will say, no shit, I won't slave away to get screwed over, it's much more straightforward business to consume porn.
A wife may feel cheated and less desired, and therefore feel like they are less necessary, a "resource" they provide is devalued.
Puritans may feel like so much sexuality and hedonism tries to cheat and get the benefits, while not suffering consequences, like pregnancy, adult responsibility of family life etc. That it hollows out the sanctity of this intimate and symbolic act.
Others may feel camgirls are collecting undeserved money, they don't do actual noble valuable work, just cash in based on their genetics and immorality.
It all comes down to a feeling that people get things they don't deserve.
It's about feelings that the young man should work his ass off to obtain status than satisfy himself with porn. The female performer should rather hold on to her sexual value and motivate men to work to get it and then only give it out when also taking on the responsibility of childbirth.
And therefore it's not likely that the debate will get "resolved", because it's not about some objective disagreement but about who deserves what. It's more metaphysical and depends on one's fundamental worldview and framework of justice.
> That it hollows out the sanctity of this intimate and symbolic act.
See that's the problem. We as a society need to stop putting sex on a pedestal. It's just sex. Pleasure is pleasure, why would anyone not want to be pleasured?
And why is pleasure something that has to be earned? It is very simple to give and receive pleasure, why complicate that?
People thought that after the pill, sex will become simple and uncomplicated, just have orgies for fun all the time. But it's not happening on a large scale even in the very liberal societies. There was a brief moment with the hippies, but it didn't last long. Yes there is hookup culture, but it's far from uncomplicated. It's not everyone can easily participate in and has its own little games.
It's one of the fundamental components building our social fabric.
Why does pleasure have to be earned? I'm not sure I subscribe to that, I probably need a few decades more of contemplation and experience to answer such a thing. I'm just saying that there is such a template in many people's moralities. I think it's kind of silly, because the universe doesn't care, it's not a vending machine to put in hard work and get rewards. It's way more random and unpredictable than that. Sometimes something easy gives you lots of reward, and toiling away in the wrong way leaves you with nothing. But on the whole, on a large scale, on a population level, at the expectation, you cannot get something out of nothing, it seems. It's not a law of physics or anything. It may also seem pseudo-religious. But overall it seems to be the strategy that people adopt who achieve things. That you need to put in effort to reap rewards. Otherwise all kinds of things can happen, like hedonic adaptation, setting your baseline at a different place, inflation of the value of things etc.
> Puritans may feel like so much sexuality and hedonism tries to cheat and get the benefits, while not suffering consequences, like pregnancy, adult responsibility of family life etc. That it hollows out the sanctity of this intimate and symbolic act.
Not a puritan, but I could never explain that viewpoint to me with anything else than envy.
Like, being careful with sex if it may lead to unwanted pregnancies makes perfect sense - but those people seem even more upset at the possibility of sex that has no risk attached to it.
Isn't improving quality of life something we are all striving for? This movement seems to go the exact opposite direction and embrace suffering instead of joy.
Sociologically, the worry is that larger and larger numbers of the young male population will withdraw, and become Hikikomori. Doing the bare minimum to sustain themselves, and riding life between moments of hollow, isolated, carnal release with no greater purpose and a constant nagging dissatisfaction with their marginal existence.
From a perspective of optimization, it could be seen as young men reaching a local minima with respect their quality of life vs the risks and costs of its maintenance.
The commodotization and derisking of sexual pleasure and titillation decouples it from the behaviors it's historically been used as a reward for. This reweights the incentive structures in our society that kept a lot of otherwise ne'er-do-well young people productive.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's something we definitely need to have a collective dialogue about, as we no longer have any centralized moral or executive authorities capable of unilaterally responding to this shift in a manner that puts us back into social balance.
Surely there is a bitter killjoy undertone in it, yes. Perhaps even more when coming from the old and weak who envy the young for their energy and enjoyment.
I think the theological morality case is more like treating sexual addiction, like porn addiction, like a sickness that needs support and treatment, at least more than it is now.
The Christian perspective is that on a moral level, watching porn is in the same category as adultery and whatever sexual immorality that is depicted in the pornography. That's because moral culpability is in the heart to start with.
Folks don't sign up for the same worldview, sure. And it's a nonsense (perhaps harmful) worldview if you reject Christian teaching altogether. But there's a lot more subtlety, realism, and (from their perspective) care for people than is captured by concerns about cheating and symbolism.
More concretely, there is a lot of excitement to see progress on modern slavery and human trafficking in many Christian circles. The intersection between pornography, sex work, and sexual slavery is especially concerning in those circles.
Not puritans per se but certainly people who push the puritan mindset, in order to profit from the hard work and sacrifice of others.
The push for full time employment for everyone, framed as a good thing, usually comes from people who do very little work themselves while profiting from it immensely.
No offense, but your take on social attitudes about porn is really strange and pretty misogynistic.
> “ Some feel like porn gives unearned satisfaction to young men, a virtual substitute they don't have to work for.”
What? Maybe extremist groups like the proud boys, but I’ve literally never heard this objection. People tend to worry more about socialization and the harmful psychological effects porn can have on people.
> “ Others may feel camgirls are collecting undeserved money, they don't do actual noble valuable work, just cash in based on their genetics and immorality.”
Again, thats an extremist misogynistic viewpoint. The real objections I’ve heard concern the exploitation of the industry and the lack of protections for workers.
All the worldviews you describe are hyper-conservative, and don’t at all describe society as a whole.
> What? Maybe extremist groups like the proud boys, but I’ve literally never heard this objection
I meant this part as quite analogous to the drug debate. People dislike drug comsumers because they feel drugs are a cheat: you get unearned pleasure without having to work for it. You sidestep your noble duties of working and earning the fruits of your labours by short-circuiting and hooking your brain directly on to pleasure juices. I think -- said explicitly or not -- a lot of the same sentiment underlies the anti-porn stance. That men can get (part of) the pleasure without the work. The underlying idea is that without porn, men would be forced to rather work on themselves, improve themselves, mature and provide value to society to attract female attention etc. Just like the (misguided or not) idea that without drugs all the junkies would suddenly go take on a decent 9-5 job and climb the ladder like one is supposed to and indulge in buying stuff with their hard earned money. Just outlining a narrative, not that I believe this simplified story, just that I think these patterns are lurking there, it's not merely about showing bodies and genitals due to some irrational arbitrary taboo.
> Again, thats an extremist misogynistic viewpoint. The real objections I’ve heard concern the exploitation of the industry and the lack of protections for workers.
What people say in public to look good is different from what they act out. Despite all the liberal attitudes in western europe for example, if you go to a brothel in Amsterdam, you won't see rich Dutch girls self-actualizing, or middle-class Norwegian girls expressing their empowered sexuality, but poor Bulgarians, Ukraininans, Hungarians, Roma, etc.
Sure there are exceptions. But overall even most of the enlightened liberal Western European parents don't actually want their daughter to become a pornstar or a prostitute. For reasons approximating my previous comment -- that they are worth more than their mere bodily appearance, etc.
Even this would make a moderate amount of sense if the work at least were meaningful. But it isn't - the only importance seems to be that the man in question appears to be successful in something, even if that work is actively harmful to society or the environment.
> Others may feel camgirls are collecting undeserved money, they don't do actual noble valuable work, just cash in based on their genetics and immorality.
As someone who is a supporter of legal sex work and pornography. The "cashing on genetics" part bothers me the most. I don't know how to process when good looking people can earn thousands of dollars almost doing nothing (particularly on digital platform like OnlyFans), whereas regular people have to work day and night to earn a living. Right now, when sex-work is stigmatized, it seems fair because they are getting paid a lot while suffering the stigma. Similar to a lot high-risk job is also high paying because of the high risk. But once sex work gets accepted in the society, then why should they get paid so much without the work like rest of the society. Maybe if sex-work gets destigmatized it will not be very high paying profession.
> The "cashing on genetics" part bothers me the most
Well, welcome to all of life. More attractive people, taller men etc. get hired, promoted and trusted more. Not just in porn, not just in regular modeling or acting or singing, but also in any job. They get better options in the dating market.
Genetically more intelligent people have higher chances at high earning jobs.
The pattern on cashing on genetics is extremely widespread and it's also not entirely clear it can be abolished without screwing up society. We do need the right people for the right jobs. You don't want to watch ugly people's porn (except if that's your thing, no kink shaming implied!), or marry stupid people etc. etc. You may try to console yourself that individual hard work can override all that, and it can to a degree, but we like to kindle ourselves in the fairytale of the "just world fallacy". Reality is harsher.
It is definitely unfair, but is it any different to an intelligent person cashing in on their genetics? I have a very well paid job as a software engineer which comes relatively easily to me. As you say, lots of people have to work really hard just to make a living.
I don't think it's just the stigma, to be fair. Earning lots of money through OnlyFans requires more than good looks, in the same way that earning lots of money through a tech startup requires more than just writing code. Also, people have cashed in on genetics for as long as modelling as been around, and obviously sex work is even older than that
Haha entire evolution has been all about "cashing on genetics". As a society our aim should be to let people of a wide variety of genetics, cash in on their respective "lottery" instead of arbitrarily drawing lines at intelligence or even steadfastness or whatever else.
NB: Writing from a perspective of someone who grew up in a conservative society (Tier 2-3 city in India), and may have a different take.
Porn has become one of those buzzwords which triggers an emotional response and is used as a political tool by everyone. ("Taking away our culture and morally corrupting the young generation" is a common refrain heard around me by prominent people even today). I feel that anything which enters this realm where your first response is a strong emotional one (nationalism, criminal etc.) its very hard to get to a solution or even a way forward. Best is to maybe just change the word you use.
This article touches upon that, inviting readers to drop off if they are triggered by usage. I would say they need to read it more than those who are happy to read further and are not triggered. This is where the outrage about the NYT article had the unintended effect. The points were correct, but were not presented factually, and instead to trigger a moral outrage causing the payment processors to stop usage. To think of it, Pornhub was one of the few sites with financial power, resources, and motivation to put the stop to revenge porn and non consensual uploads. Asking to do that would not have scored any points for anyone. Maybe the solution I propose isnt right, but it is impossible to have that conversation given the vitriol internet generates for anything like a half cooked thought not agreeing to the mainstream idea.
fwiw, the usual usage of the term (as in the above comment) is not the same as the highly specific government usage that the wiki page described.
The usual usage is just:
Tier 1: Metro cities, the ones you've likely heard of. Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi etc.
Tier 2: Cities, but much smaller population-wise. These are the cities that are getting newer airports for eg. Most state-capitals would fall here. These count up to around 50 to 100 depending on who you ask. Linked to national highways usually.
Tier 3: Small urban towns. Population is usually a few lakh (1 lakh=100_000) at most. (<300k or so).
It more-or-less corresponds to the X/Y/Z usage on the wikipedia article.
Plenty has been written in this thread about the article's take on SV attitudes on sex workers. For the most part, I think the article is right. But there's another reason why tech orgs and banks don't want porn, which it completely ignores: the sheer quantity of bad actors around the industry. Chargebacks, disputes, hacking, spam, money laundering, content theft, stalking, child pornography, and so forth are all endemic to the porn industry. Sure there's gold in them thar hills, and lots of it, but the hills are being shelled and ninjas are hiding in every bush. Perhaps OnlyFans is finding a better path. Or maybe they're just in the early golden age before the same forces crowd in and shell them, too.
While what you say about bad actors is true, I just don't buy your argument. SV prides itself in solving "hard problems" (whether that's actually true is another issue entirely), so are you honestly saying that the issue with high chargeback rates or illegal content is too difficult to solve? I mean, SV can create advanced electric cars, launch rockets into space, serve millions of queries a second, but porn spam is too difficult?
I think the moralistic argument makes much more sense. Most of the VC types who want to "make it big" in SV do it not just for the money, but also for the approval of their peers and the praise of their Ivy-league brethren ("Wow, look how smart he is, he was one of the earliest investors in Facebook!") Making it big in porn just wouldn't have the same cachet, and would be a potential minefield of social opprobrium.
Many have tried; there are a lot of bodies on those hills. Take chargebacks. Not only does the merchant who gets a chargeback lose the money, they're typically hit with a $20-$100 fee on top. It's very common and an old trick to use stolen credit cards, download all the premium content, and redistribute on your own site. Or maybe just because your spouse found the line item on your credit card and you're embarrassed. The chargeback rate for the adult industry is said to be about 15%; the vast majority of merchant accounts will drop you after reaching 1%.
Porn spam is an unbelievable technical challenge because it's so damn profitable. If you fight them you are fighting the best—and an army of hundreds of thousands of the not-so-best, who can overwhelm you with sheer numbers. Also the spammers tend to be vindictive kooks, and active efforts against them can bring DDoSes, swatting, and other unpleasantries down on you and yours.
Child porn and revenge porn are ever-present. You will have to moderate it, which means people will have to see the images. Also people like to use porn sites to distribute snuff imagery (videos of suffering/torture/death). Imagine the job of a Facebook moderator except ultra-concentrated.
I don't think the moralistic and execution arguments are opposed; rather they are an ill-virtued cycle of reinforcement. The industry is shady and filled with bad people because it's said to be shady and filled with bad people. I do expect SV & friends to keep trying, because there's just so much money!
Considering what the original idea behind Facemash was, I don't think the type of industry to achieve success in matters.
Porn spam is difficult in the same manner filter-evading YouTube clips are - it's human intelligence applied at scale. With highly motivated humans at that. It really is harder than all the things which you mentioned.
> I think the moralistic argument makes much more sense.
I find it absurdly laughable that you think that there is any moralistic response from Silicon Valley VCs who have funded outright theft and lawbreaking--and who also funded YouTube when it was primarily a porn distribution system.
People have made lots of money from porn over the years. The porn tech conference used to occur at the same time as CES--and often it was more technical than CES--things like Laserdics, DVDs, the web, online credit card tech, etc. all were at the porn conference long before the mainstream ones. One could make an uncharitable comment about it being more profitable to sell shovels in the gold rush than to be a miner/performer ...
The big issue with porn sites is that they only scale so far, and then it's a race to the bottom, and when you hit the bottom the law starts knocking on your door. So, you have to switch off porn before the race to the bottom starts if you want to scale further. And if you make make that change at the wrong time or in the wrong way, your site dies.
OnlyFans is in the race to the bottom now. There is always another girl who looks just as good who will do whatever thing you want for 10% less than that other girl. Do you really think that people really care whether they're watching Porn Star A or Porn Star B--or whether they care that Porn Star B is $10 less per <whatever>?
Sure, there will be some exceptions where a bunch of people want to see some famous Disney tart's naughty bits. The rest of the performers, however, are in the swamp.
OnlyFans broke the monopoly. Great! But then it will become the monopoly. The wheel simply turns.
I'm glad that monetized platforms like Twitch and OnlyFans exist. It's an accessible way for the younger generations to make ludicrous amounts of money for not too much up-front investment. There's definitely work and downsides involved, just not like some lesser paid, more credentialed professions. Hopefully this puts pressure on the essential jobs in society to actually raise compensation in comparison.
The rest of us boring, unattractive folks will just have to settle for desk jobs.
I think it's better than the alternative, as it eliminates the middle man and the performers own the content. But I imagine it will end up like most platforms for content, yielding to superstar economics and a race to the bottom for everyone else whose work has become commoditized and faces unyielding competition for attention. The vast majority of creators on OnlyFans will likely not be able to support themselves I'd guess, or if they will it will only be as supplemental income (I'm saying based on looking at no data).
> But I imagine it will end up like most platforms for content, yielding to superstar economics and a race to the bottom for everyone else whose work has become commoditized and faces unyielding competition for attention.
With 700k creators earning a cumulative total of 700m, and a few of them earning hundreds of thousands or even millions, it sounds like it already has.
The only investment being that they're selling their body for money, and generating a negative presence online that doesn't help their future career aspirations. I don't think this is a good thing to encourage young people to do.
There's way more work that goes into making and maintaining that presence than just showing up with a body or personality. A lot is marketing, but it's not like traditional marketing you'd be taught at a university. They're figuring a lot of it out by trial and error, which is some amount of risk of getting it wrong. And popularity can swing quickly and dramatically so you can get fired by the internet mobs (more risk).
Not sure why it's a negative presence, either. Anyone who thinks it was a negative presence is not really someone you'd want a job from after making $10,000 - $100,000 a month.
They are selling pictures of their body. The body gets nearly no wear and tear for the work.
There's only negative presence in the sense of haters. Would you also encourage young people to avoid being Black, or Muslim, because that's a "negative presence"?
What a super fascinating demonstration this thread is of why OnlyFans could never have been a Silicon Valley company.
I'm not going to risk getting pulled into any of the ten different arguments going on here, beyond stating that I consider it a very good thing to increase the agency of the most vulnerable members of this line of work. But suffice to say that with this level of vehement disagreement even on whether sex work has any sort of societal value at all, it's really no surprise that this lucrative opportunity has gone to a region that doesn't have these moral qualms.
And that is a little surprising, given that, as the author points out, Silicon Valley takes no issue with any number of other industries that have debatable moral consequences.
Does selling advertisements for cars or penis pills provide societal value? I think a lot of things we do don't have societal value but we do it because there's a demand in the market for it.
A lot of human activity isn't about value creation but zero sum competition for limited resources, rent seeking, striving for a relatively higher spot in the status hierarchy, reallocation of wealth, fight for power over each other etc.
I like how people think the media they consume isn't porn.
It's almost the exact same experience of aspiration, hope, envy, release, etc. Even though it's all media, and yet we say the sex media is taboo, when reality is these representations of what we perceive to be powerful and desirable are all the same thing.
When I wrote for magazines, and after we got into the drinks, I'd have this same conversation with some of the more bourgeois writers and editors, who insisted they were prim and serious, but when it came down to it, they were in the porn business, just the fancy kind.
Whether you are looking at naked people, expensive clothing, cars, or even very serious and meaningful political commentary - it's all on a spectrum of sensational pornography. Even renowned fashion photographer Helmut Newton famously talked about the store Hermès as the world's most exclusive sex shop. He understood it, and he knew exactly what he was doing.
The only difference is in the aesthetics and beliefs the pornography reinforces.
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It's such a primitive and toxic line of thinking. The real explanation is that SV doesn't care about the plight of porn actresses not because they're women, but because people in general mostly care about themselves and their closest ones only. Just see that the SV also doesn't care about the plight of rare earth miners (which SV needs for their electronics), even though they're mostly men. I.e. the gender is not a factor here, and yet article authors try very hard to make it look like it is.
In the sense that algorithms do nudge our behaviour in insidious ways, addicted consumers of porn can be seen as victims of a sort. But, to suggest that the social stigma associated with porn usage is equal, much less anywhere near approaching, or in the same order of magnitude of the social stigma that sex workers face, is just so incredibly wrong.
Being monetarily compensated doesn't prevent being a victim, which is the basis of all labor protection legislation beyond “workers must get paid at least a token amount”.
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its especially a nonsense argument when you note that porn is one of the few industries with a huge pay gap - and in favor of women. its so significant that top tier actresses pay scale has a floor that is higher than the ceiling of the equivalent male talent.
It enjoy being subjected to different views. I hope we can uphold a certain standard for expressing them around here.
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Other then reputation nightmare of doing that kind of business, most of SV would jump in without hesitation. There’s shit tone of money in it, worth of grabbing for them... :)
So it may not be that they don't care about women. Simply that they don't understand and recognize the harm to women.
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Your contra argument implicitly assumes that tech makes are special kind of males that don't use porn.
Porn doesn't compare favorably to their other opportunities. Full Stop.
If it did compare favorably, they would be putting money and resources in porn.
If you go on reddit you can find many threads discussing cam girls who are suspected to either be underage or be literal sex slaves.
There are actual ethical porn producers of various flavours (also featured on HN quite a few times). Onlyfans is not one of them.
I see this article as more of an interesting take on how wealthy Silicon Valley men perceive each other. My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. Banks created that paradigm so of course it would be difficult for any VC firm to justify using non-fiat currency to enrich themselves. To apply gender to this and to arbitrarily add to the list of problems that men created is dubious at best.
If you want tech to create solutions for sex, the sex industry, and sex workers at large then people need to change. Already there are people on this thread attempting to correlate what I assume is BDSM to pedophilia, and echoing the voices I mentioned earlier. Protecting sex workers or even sex enthusiasts will always be an iterative game that requires constant attention. The worst thing we can do is to continue to ignore it and apply moralistic language from either end of the spectrum to the problem.
Some people might really enjoy a fallacy like action is inaction here, which is telling.
I think this is a pretty american centric point of view. These debates don't have anywhere near the same back and forth in other countries (thinking of canada in particular) that they do in USA.
I imagine how taboo porn is is also very much a cultural phenomenon that varries a lot place to place.
The debates in the US sound ridiculous to me.
It's like the US is a first world country full of people from a few centuries ago.
The gun control debate is largely settled but I suspect it will start up quite loudly if the EU ever tries to normalize gun laws across member states. The difference between say, the Netherlands (low ownership, very hard to get a license), Austria (moderately regulated and lots of unlicensed ownership), and Finland (very high ownership rate but strictly regulated) is probably wider than any US state, because the US constitution has been interpreted to set a fairly high bar for any regulation.
Most porn can be bought with credit cards, at least in the USA. Mainstream payment processing companies like stripe may not be willing to do it but if you go try to buy (legal) porn right now with a credit card you will be able to do it.
I remember this being discussed a number of years ago: https://fetlife.com/help/can-i-use-a-credit-card-to-support-...
You could argue the merits of the website (I am not a member) but at the end of the day if you can only use BitCoin or a bank account then the policies have failed businesses, consumers, and content creators.
I don't know where the lines lie for decency in credit card payments or what they consider acceptable risk, but I would point back to my original assertion. If you cannot pay the best coders, the best business people, then those worries will not be solved.
but it's not as easy as mainstream, and often much more expensive to process and in some cases to even sign up.
Last I looked into ccBill - they were collecting an extra 2 grand up front payment to enable process mastercard.
These systems are taking advantage of niche classes imho.
There is also the threat of getting deplatformed / de-processed? quickly because bad PR - something that a local hardware store would not be worried about.
It's harder to find places to work with you, it's more expensive, and easier to loose your ability to get paid. Sometimes there are things like operation chokepoint that try to make it near impossible for a small independent operator to go out on her own.
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Hmm, the 3 adult shops I pass on the way into work beg to differ. You can buy anything from lingerie, to lube (with CBD Oil!), videos, handcuffs, ball gags... You can get any of this stuff online too.
The only place where you might struggle to use Visa cards for sex is on sites that have been busted with illegal content.
So after all those years, we have finally found a use case for cryptocurrencies!
I really don't think this is accurate analysis of abortion debate in USA. First, I am not even sure what difference should the middle require in your analysis.
What progress on abortion would you expect to happen had advocates stopped talking?
Well, duh!
I remember buying porn with CCBill (from my experience, a payment company for porn and shareware) many years ago. I don’t remember there ever being a time when there was a problem purchasing porn.
Conservatives and progressives/liberals have completely different world views:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)
There may be some underlying biological differences, that then get reinforced culturally (the old nature/nurture debate):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuc...
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-...
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/
Political polarization hasn't helped in trying to find a middle path between these views in recent years/decades:
* https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/political-polarization/
* https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-g...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization
Especially in the US, where it seems the Right has moved further over than the Left:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...
As of 2014, when that Atlantic piece was written, that may have been true. As of 2020, the left has also radicalized itself:
* https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1339984166935359488?s=...
* https://www.thenation.com/article/society/black-votes-repara...
* https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
There are people who buy into politics but not culture though (eg: it is possible for one to be politically liberal but then be more culturally free rather than culturally constrained). These people, in the sense of sex work and the porn industry may be able to produce viable solutions and products, but they'd constantly be on the defensive against both political cultures.
Tech isn't all about making money. Silicon Valley probably is.
I think the debate is not really about porn, but people's sense of justice, cheating, deserving things or not etc.
Some feel like porn gives unearned satisfaction to young men, a virtual substitute they don't have to work for. The bitter other side will say, no shit, I won't slave away to get screwed over, it's much more straightforward business to consume porn.
A wife may feel cheated and less desired, and therefore feel like they are less necessary, a "resource" they provide is devalued.
Puritans may feel like so much sexuality and hedonism tries to cheat and get the benefits, while not suffering consequences, like pregnancy, adult responsibility of family life etc. That it hollows out the sanctity of this intimate and symbolic act.
Others may feel camgirls are collecting undeserved money, they don't do actual noble valuable work, just cash in based on their genetics and immorality.
It all comes down to a feeling that people get things they don't deserve.
It's about feelings that the young man should work his ass off to obtain status than satisfy himself with porn. The female performer should rather hold on to her sexual value and motivate men to work to get it and then only give it out when also taking on the responsibility of childbirth.
And therefore it's not likely that the debate will get "resolved", because it's not about some objective disagreement but about who deserves what. It's more metaphysical and depends on one's fundamental worldview and framework of justice.
See that's the problem. We as a society need to stop putting sex on a pedestal. It's just sex. Pleasure is pleasure, why would anyone not want to be pleasured?
And why is pleasure something that has to be earned? It is very simple to give and receive pleasure, why complicate that?
https://xkcd.com/592/
People thought that after the pill, sex will become simple and uncomplicated, just have orgies for fun all the time. But it's not happening on a large scale even in the very liberal societies. There was a brief moment with the hippies, but it didn't last long. Yes there is hookup culture, but it's far from uncomplicated. It's not everyone can easily participate in and has its own little games.
It's one of the fundamental components building our social fabric.
Why does pleasure have to be earned? I'm not sure I subscribe to that, I probably need a few decades more of contemplation and experience to answer such a thing. I'm just saying that there is such a template in many people's moralities. I think it's kind of silly, because the universe doesn't care, it's not a vending machine to put in hard work and get rewards. It's way more random and unpredictable than that. Sometimes something easy gives you lots of reward, and toiling away in the wrong way leaves you with nothing. But on the whole, on a large scale, on a population level, at the expectation, you cannot get something out of nothing, it seems. It's not a law of physics or anything. It may also seem pseudo-religious. But overall it seems to be the strategy that people adopt who achieve things. That you need to put in effort to reap rewards. Otherwise all kinds of things can happen, like hedonic adaptation, setting your baseline at a different place, inflation of the value of things etc.
The truest line from Starship Troopers.
Not a puritan, but I could never explain that viewpoint to me with anything else than envy.
Like, being careful with sex if it may lead to unwanted pregnancies makes perfect sense - but those people seem even more upset at the possibility of sex that has no risk attached to it.
Isn't improving quality of life something we are all striving for? This movement seems to go the exact opposite direction and embrace suffering instead of joy.
From a perspective of optimization, it could be seen as young men reaching a local minima with respect their quality of life vs the risks and costs of its maintenance.
The commodotization and derisking of sexual pleasure and titillation decouples it from the behaviors it's historically been used as a reward for. This reweights the incentive structures in our society that kept a lot of otherwise ne'er-do-well young people productive.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's something we definitely need to have a collective dialogue about, as we no longer have any centralized moral or executive authorities capable of unilaterally responding to this shift in a manner that puts us back into social balance.
But I don't think that's all.
I think the theological morality case is more like treating sexual addiction, like porn addiction, like a sickness that needs support and treatment, at least more than it is now.
The Christian perspective is that on a moral level, watching porn is in the same category as adultery and whatever sexual immorality that is depicted in the pornography. That's because moral culpability is in the heart to start with.
Folks don't sign up for the same worldview, sure. And it's a nonsense (perhaps harmful) worldview if you reject Christian teaching altogether. But there's a lot more subtlety, realism, and (from their perspective) care for people than is captured by concerns about cheating and symbolism.
More concretely, there is a lot of excitement to see progress on modern slavery and human trafficking in many Christian circles. The intersection between pornography, sex work, and sexual slavery is especially concerning in those circles.
> “ Some feel like porn gives unearned satisfaction to young men, a virtual substitute they don't have to work for.”
What? Maybe extremist groups like the proud boys, but I’ve literally never heard this objection. People tend to worry more about socialization and the harmful psychological effects porn can have on people.
> “ Others may feel camgirls are collecting undeserved money, they don't do actual noble valuable work, just cash in based on their genetics and immorality.”
Again, thats an extremist misogynistic viewpoint. The real objections I’ve heard concern the exploitation of the industry and the lack of protections for workers.
All the worldviews you describe are hyper-conservative, and don’t at all describe society as a whole.
I meant this part as quite analogous to the drug debate. People dislike drug comsumers because they feel drugs are a cheat: you get unearned pleasure without having to work for it. You sidestep your noble duties of working and earning the fruits of your labours by short-circuiting and hooking your brain directly on to pleasure juices. I think -- said explicitly or not -- a lot of the same sentiment underlies the anti-porn stance. That men can get (part of) the pleasure without the work. The underlying idea is that without porn, men would be forced to rather work on themselves, improve themselves, mature and provide value to society to attract female attention etc. Just like the (misguided or not) idea that without drugs all the junkies would suddenly go take on a decent 9-5 job and climb the ladder like one is supposed to and indulge in buying stuff with their hard earned money. Just outlining a narrative, not that I believe this simplified story, just that I think these patterns are lurking there, it's not merely about showing bodies and genitals due to some irrational arbitrary taboo.
> Again, thats an extremist misogynistic viewpoint. The real objections I’ve heard concern the exploitation of the industry and the lack of protections for workers.
What people say in public to look good is different from what they act out. Despite all the liberal attitudes in western europe for example, if you go to a brothel in Amsterdam, you won't see rich Dutch girls self-actualizing, or middle-class Norwegian girls expressing their empowered sexuality, but poor Bulgarians, Ukraininans, Hungarians, Roma, etc.
Sure there are exceptions. But overall even most of the enlightened liberal Western European parents don't actually want their daughter to become a pornstar or a prostitute. For reasons approximating my previous comment -- that they are worth more than their mere bodily appearance, etc.
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Even this would make a moderate amount of sense if the work at least were meaningful. But it isn't - the only importance seems to be that the man in question appears to be successful in something, even if that work is actively harmful to society or the environment.
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What? No. This is idiotic. Who said that?
As someone who is a supporter of legal sex work and pornography. The "cashing on genetics" part bothers me the most. I don't know how to process when good looking people can earn thousands of dollars almost doing nothing (particularly on digital platform like OnlyFans), whereas regular people have to work day and night to earn a living. Right now, when sex-work is stigmatized, it seems fair because they are getting paid a lot while suffering the stigma. Similar to a lot high-risk job is also high paying because of the high risk. But once sex work gets accepted in the society, then why should they get paid so much without the work like rest of the society. Maybe if sex-work gets destigmatized it will not be very high paying profession.
Well, welcome to all of life. More attractive people, taller men etc. get hired, promoted and trusted more. Not just in porn, not just in regular modeling or acting or singing, but also in any job. They get better options in the dating market.
Genetically more intelligent people have higher chances at high earning jobs.
The pattern on cashing on genetics is extremely widespread and it's also not entirely clear it can be abolished without screwing up society. We do need the right people for the right jobs. You don't want to watch ugly people's porn (except if that's your thing, no kink shaming implied!), or marry stupid people etc. etc. You may try to console yourself that individual hard work can override all that, and it can to a degree, but we like to kindle ourselves in the fairytale of the "just world fallacy". Reality is harsher.
Porn has become one of those buzzwords which triggers an emotional response and is used as a political tool by everyone. ("Taking away our culture and morally corrupting the young generation" is a common refrain heard around me by prominent people even today). I feel that anything which enters this realm where your first response is a strong emotional one (nationalism, criminal etc.) its very hard to get to a solution or even a way forward. Best is to maybe just change the word you use.
This article touches upon that, inviting readers to drop off if they are triggered by usage. I would say they need to read it more than those who are happy to read further and are not triggered. This is where the outrage about the NYT article had the unintended effect. The points were correct, but were not presented factually, and instead to trigger a moral outrage causing the payment processors to stop usage. To think of it, Pornhub was one of the few sites with financial power, resources, and motivation to put the stop to revenge porn and non consensual uploads. Asking to do that would not have scored any points for anyone. Maybe the solution I propose isnt right, but it is impossible to have that conversation given the vitriol internet generates for anything like a half cooked thought not agreeing to the mainstream idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_citie...
The usual usage is just:
Tier 1: Metro cities, the ones you've likely heard of. Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi etc.
Tier 2: Cities, but much smaller population-wise. These are the cities that are getting newer airports for eg. Most state-capitals would fall here. These count up to around 50 to 100 depending on who you ask. Linked to national highways usually.
Tier 3: Small urban towns. Population is usually a few lakh (1 lakh=100_000) at most. (<300k or so).
It more-or-less corresponds to the X/Y/Z usage on the wikipedia article.
If one's morals can be corrupted by porn, one hadn't much morals to begin with.
Where porn exposes one's weaknesses, one should introspect to evolve, not tilt against windmills.
It sounds like "we shouldnt help the weaker ones"
It's 100% correct.
I think the moralistic argument makes much more sense. Most of the VC types who want to "make it big" in SV do it not just for the money, but also for the approval of their peers and the praise of their Ivy-league brethren ("Wow, look how smart he is, he was one of the earliest investors in Facebook!") Making it big in porn just wouldn't have the same cachet, and would be a potential minefield of social opprobrium.
Porn spam is an unbelievable technical challenge because it's so damn profitable. If you fight them you are fighting the best—and an army of hundreds of thousands of the not-so-best, who can overwhelm you with sheer numbers. Also the spammers tend to be vindictive kooks, and active efforts against them can bring DDoSes, swatting, and other unpleasantries down on you and yours.
Child porn and revenge porn are ever-present. You will have to moderate it, which means people will have to see the images. Also people like to use porn sites to distribute snuff imagery (videos of suffering/torture/death). Imagine the job of a Facebook moderator except ultra-concentrated.
I don't think the moralistic and execution arguments are opposed; rather they are an ill-virtued cycle of reinforcement. The industry is shady and filled with bad people because it's said to be shady and filled with bad people. I do expect SV & friends to keep trying, because there's just so much money!
Porn spam is difficult in the same manner filter-evading YouTube clips are - it's human intelligence applied at scale. With highly motivated humans at that. It really is harder than all the things which you mentioned.
I find it absurdly laughable that you think that there is any moralistic response from Silicon Valley VCs who have funded outright theft and lawbreaking--and who also funded YouTube when it was primarily a porn distribution system.
People have made lots of money from porn over the years. The porn tech conference used to occur at the same time as CES--and often it was more technical than CES--things like Laserdics, DVDs, the web, online credit card tech, etc. all were at the porn conference long before the mainstream ones. One could make an uncharitable comment about it being more profitable to sell shovels in the gold rush than to be a miner/performer ...
The big issue with porn sites is that they only scale so far, and then it's a race to the bottom, and when you hit the bottom the law starts knocking on your door. So, you have to switch off porn before the race to the bottom starts if you want to scale further. And if you make make that change at the wrong time or in the wrong way, your site dies.
OnlyFans is in the race to the bottom now. There is always another girl who looks just as good who will do whatever thing you want for 10% less than that other girl. Do you really think that people really care whether they're watching Porn Star A or Porn Star B--or whether they care that Porn Star B is $10 less per <whatever>?
Sure, there will be some exceptions where a bunch of people want to see some famous Disney tart's naughty bits. The rest of the performers, however, are in the swamp.
OnlyFans broke the monopoly. Great! But then it will become the monopoly. The wheel simply turns.
The rest of us boring, unattractive folks will just have to settle for desk jobs.
With 700k creators earning a cumulative total of 700m, and a few of them earning hundreds of thousands or even millions, it sounds like it already has.
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Is this really progress towards equality, or a generation of women self-objectifying themselves.
The battle cry of the can't be arsed. The difference between them and you is you applied for the desk job.
Can't be arsed to do what?
Not sure why it's a negative presence, either. Anyone who thinks it was a negative presence is not really someone you'd want a job from after making $10,000 - $100,000 a month.
There's only negative presence in the sense of haters. Would you also encourage young people to avoid being Black, or Muslim, because that's a "negative presence"?
I'm not going to risk getting pulled into any of the ten different arguments going on here, beyond stating that I consider it a very good thing to increase the agency of the most vulnerable members of this line of work. But suffice to say that with this level of vehement disagreement even on whether sex work has any sort of societal value at all, it's really no surprise that this lucrative opportunity has gone to a region that doesn't have these moral qualms.
And that is a little surprising, given that, as the author points out, Silicon Valley takes no issue with any number of other industries that have debatable moral consequences.
So basically, you only want to state your own opinion, and not hear the many that disagree with you?
Then why not put it on a personal blog, rather than a site intended for discussion?
It's almost the exact same experience of aspiration, hope, envy, release, etc. Even though it's all media, and yet we say the sex media is taboo, when reality is these representations of what we perceive to be powerful and desirable are all the same thing.
When I wrote for magazines, and after we got into the drinks, I'd have this same conversation with some of the more bourgeois writers and editors, who insisted they were prim and serious, but when it came down to it, they were in the porn business, just the fancy kind.
Whether you are looking at naked people, expensive clothing, cars, or even very serious and meaningful political commentary - it's all on a spectrum of sensational pornography. Even renowned fashion photographer Helmut Newton famously talked about the store Hermès as the world's most exclusive sex shop. He understood it, and he knew exactly what he was doing.
The only difference is in the aesthetics and beliefs the pornography reinforces.