Not a moralistic take, but one issue that interests me is the second-order impacts associated with the long tail of producers in OF who do not make a career from it.
With traditional adult entertainment, creators are aware of the social ramifications (e.g., social stigma, familial ostracism, difficulty dealing with the future, and so on), and there is a decent theoretical economic framework to measure that.
I am not sure if there's the same this new army of "civilians" joining OF, let alone the additional toll it will take on the creators in terms of social ostracism, future prospects, future opportunities, and mental health.
OTOH this is not the same as "VHS" porn of the past decades.
A few decades ago, there weren't that many "productions", performers were much fewer and some porn performers name were known by anyone, regardless if you had seen porn with them staring or not. A person getting out of the business and trying to make a new career would have a high chance of meeting people, especially men, in real life who might have seen at least one movie.
Nowadays pornhub and onlyfans are flooded by wannabee independent performers. Even the most addicted to porn can't possibly follow and keep track of more than a tiny subset of performers. So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
> Even the most addicted to porn can't possibly follow and keep track of more than a tiny subset of performers. So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
This is dangerously wrong coming at least a decade after there are entire communities devoted to unmasking performers’ real identities and multiple reverse image search tools exist as apparent businesses. That used to be a human-driven practice - I first heard about it coverage of the Chinese internet mobs from the perspective of victims of misidentification - but like everything else it’s reportedly adopting AI. Here’s a story which got a bit of discussion a few years back:
One of the big things to remember is that these systems don’t need to be perfect, or even close, to cause harm. Even if they were only 10% accurate, that’s still a lot of people living with the question of whether the person they just met knows or whether today is the day some nut sent those links to HR. You can’t rely on getting lost in the crowd any more.
> Nowadays pornhub and onlyfans are flooded by wannabee independent performers. Even the most addicted to porn can't possibly follow and keep track of more than a tiny subset of performers. So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
Your model of "social ramifications" seems to assume no one ever talks to anyone else, which is dead wrong. So to see problems, the only thing that needs to happen is one person needs to see their porn out of maybe the 1000 people who could recognize the performer IRL, then a rumor starts and a significant fraction of the 1000 (and more people besides) find out. No fame required.
Then the problem can balloon if another person out of that 1000 is angry with the performer, and decides to dox them by creating a website or posting that explicitly outs them to anyone who searches their name on Google.
Then, on top of that, there's all the facial recognition tech that's floating around, which is basically a "go strait to jail, to not pass go" thing.
This is a topic I can speak on. I was a top male performer on one of the live sites about 10 years ago. I've went on to having a successful career in software, it helped me afford getting through college, I'm not sure I would have had the career I did without that help.
I think the odds of getting recognized were a bit lower for me being a male, my peak live viewership was a little over 1k viewers. A video of me also got reposted and featured on PornHub gay and was able to accumulate ~100k views before I was able to get it taken down. There are still plenty of videos around that I wasn't able to get taken down but the big sites like PornHub respect DMCA takedown requests.
Regarding getting recognized, I think you are somewhat right but it likely still happens. I had 2 people recognize me in person, only 1 found my real name because they recognized me at my college graduation. Nothing came of it besides them trying to add me on FaceBook. I think for girls they would be more likely to get recognized if they are successful because they get a lot more viewers.
I was lucky that nobody that did recognize me posted anywhere about what my real name is since that would be a way to find the videos of me when people search my real name. I think that is probably the biggest risk with performing is that if that association happens, it would probably be hard to wipe that association from the internet. One way out of it for women though is that they could take their spouses last name when they get married, their new name wouldn't be associated with the old porn name.
I have told people in my life about that past job. It had no impact on any of those relationships and never really came up again. So if it did come up again, I don't think it would have much impact on my life. In my mind, sex work is real work and those who do it should not be shamed for doing it.
> So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
I have no comment on the morals and ethics but as far as modern technology goes; most if not all of OnlyFans finds its way to darkweb | pirate | hoarder megasites where there's always a few because-we-can obsessed techlords training facial recognition, gait recognition, and seeding AI generated VR porn engines, etc.
We can be certain that any woman with an OnlyFans portfolio will face that being dragged up later in their life if they are at all slightly public.
They do have the modern available hand wave explaination of "deepfake by weird ex" that becomes more and more believable each passing day.
Actually in modern times it could be blink of an eye of a search if someone wants to find and has the motivation. In some cases such a search result match/suggestion might as well be inadvertent. But easy nonetheless.
it's possible, we'll see. certainly the stigma is much less now than it was 40 years ago in the vhs age
also most of the camgirls i know in real life block access to people who live in the same country as they (and i) do; that greatly reduces the chance of awkward dialogues with long-distant uncles at the next family reunion
Similar to how job listings often ask for LinkedIn, I wonder how long until there is a field for OnlyFans or PornHub creator accounts. Dystopian and depraved, sounds perfect for this godless timeline.
> the additional toll it will take on the creators in terms of social ostracism, future prospects, future opportunities, and mental health.
Is it such a big problem nowadays as it used to be? My impression is that society in general, and younger people in particular, have become more tolerant of such things; at least in Northern Europe.
I see discussions on Reddit periodically where it makes long term relationships complicated.
I’m an old married guy, but I can’t imagine dating and then finding out that the person you were involved with was doing that type of thing. In a friend group I wouldn’t even blink.
Based on the conversations I see, this seems to be a common experience.
What toll exactly do you expect people to have to pay? I've been naked on the internet for money. That content is still there. It has not impacted me adversely in any way, nor has it had a negative impact on the many women I know who have created adult content. If anything, for me it has been fun and liberating.
This. This is the real social problem we should be fighting. SW should not impinge on career or social status.
As a hiring manager, if anything I'd want to consider sex performers as a green flag in a job history. Speaks to resourcefulness, social skills, courage and self confidence.
There's an inherent risk to hiring someone who has sexualized themselves. False allegations or true allegations are more likely to arise that put the employer in legal jeopardy.
If transactional sex becomes the norm, while amorous sex becomes scarce, there a few unwanted consequences for the whole society. A few examples: the access to reproduction for the poor is decreased, men in particular feeling unwanted, unable to find a partner and in general feeling uninvested in the common good, which inevitably leads to violence. Yes, it is extreme, but incels in the Western world are a thing and so are 30 million Chinese men who will not have a partner because there are fewer women in that generation.
This is why in general it is frowned upon by "certain members of society" as you call them.
It isn't that sex itself is immoral. Sex work has a lot of different forms
Some forms are a lot more taxing on both mental and physical health (plus STD risk). OF doesn't have this same level of risk but people mentally lump it all together
The morals are there for a reason, they just lack nuance
Entirely unironically I believe that that first line is the prime cause of crashing birthrate. Surely labor exploitation contributes substantially followed by urban over-population, but THAT has to be it.
Japan's actually got the least-worst birthrates among Far East, and everyone knows what it's best known for on the Internet.
>With traditional adult entertainment, creators are aware of the social ramifications (e.g., social stigma, familial ostracism, difficulty dealing with the future, and so on)
I don't know why you say this, as it is laughably untrue. The porn industry has ALWAYS filled itself with very very young women who were assured (by liars) their family and friends and coworkers wouldn't see it, promised they wouldn't have to do certain things that they then get pressured and bullied into doing, and giving the women zero control over the produced media, how it is represented, how THEY are represented, and how it is portrayed to the audience.
There's an immense amount of regret and "I didn't know" in the industry.
I would find it very interesting if there was a study done on second order impacts of porn producers. I suspect the outcome would be the opposite of the assumed, as in I suspect the average creator has an above average outcome compare to others with similar demographic and social economic status.
I am reminded of the study done on the damaged goods hypothesis, which gave a negative on that hypothesis. Not only did porn actresses not have higher rate of childhood sexual abuse, but they rated higher than the average in terms of self-esteem, positive feelings, and social support. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23167939/)
Like the recent story about a woman who ran for congress in Virginia, and lost 48.7% to 50.7% after it came out that she'd made tons of (consensual, legal) porn videos with her husband and sold them online.
If people are aware that more people are doing it surely the stigma is lessened as the practice is more normalized. For instance homosexuality is not a big deal now because it's seen as more common and therefore more normal. Certainly at high levels of revenue most people would consider it a financial success and a sign of status to be that beautiful.
Well, those civilians who can think for themselves, especially about the consequences of their actions, are clearly in advantage. I am lacking empathy for those who are apparently so hooked up to the here-and-now that they seem to ignore the future. If you sell your body, most societies will punish you. Thats fine, societies have all sorts of norms we all need to learn.
> If you sell your body, most societies will punish you.
Why though? It is an interesting issue when you look closer. For an individual, it's more obvious - I wouldn't like to be with a prostitute because of possible hidden diseases and lack of trust - but there is no way of telling how many sexual contacts my new partner had, whether paid for or not.
But I wouldn't have any problem working with an ex-pro in the same company or team, they would be just a colleague like all the rest, and I can't imagine any adult making any immature comments about the past of any colleagues on my team.
> If you sell your body, most societies will punish you. Thats [sic] fine, […]
How is that 'fine'?
I would like to see a future where someone doing sex work to make ends meet (or even as a freely chosen profession!) is not ostracised for it. Sex is part of society whether you want it or not, and so is paying for sexual acts.
> I am lacking empathy for those who are apparently so hooked up to the here-and-now
A large amount of those people are very young, at an age where you don't really pick your options solely on their super long term consequences.
Most people are going to be "stupid" in their early adulthood, failing and adjusting is a big part of it. Unfortunately, some of those decisions will stick more than others and sex work is very sticky (zing).
Historically, many of societies' "norms" have been hateful, vile and narrowly targeted. There is a thousand years of history showing us that we are better off challenging norms than adhering to them.
> If you sell your body, most societies will punish you.
No, if you sell sex, lots of societies will punish you. Selling or renting your body otherwise -- which a very large share of jobs involve just as much as sex work does -- is otherwise lauded.
> Thats fine, societies have all sorts of norms we all need to learn.
Lots of norms that societies have or historically have had would be better eliminated. That something is an existing norm isn't an argument in favor of it being a norm.
> It’s just as easy to imagine demand for the “real thing” going down due to the emergence of more substitutes as it is to imagine the premium for parasocial authenticity going up. And yet only Generative AI “creators” will truly do whatever “you” want and only for you. And unlike real ones, they speak in every language and are available at any time (and eventually, in immersive 3D).
Disagree. When (AI is) mentioned it has a negative correlation. Real content will fetch a premium
It's the same pipe dream as "AI content creators will take over youtube".
There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random. A better way to look at it is there are 4 million humans out there trying every permutation to crack success, and ~400k actually do it.
Unless you have a sufficiently advanced AI agent that is both varying it's content and it's marketing strategy to the tune of maybe ~1000 different iterations it's unlikely we will see a version of OnlyFans that exists that is majority AI generated.
The "parasocial ai girlfriend" sounds like a flawed premise aswell. OF girls are not therapists - Cardi B, Bhad Bhabie, and others aren't raking in millions because they are good girlfriends (although that is part of the upsell). Social status plays a part in the most successful girls, people seem to subscribe because the creator is popular, especially if she's already built a platform elsewhere.
In short, social status does not have an AI substitute.
> There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random.
That observation has echoes of the music industry - another extremely top-heavy creator business. There are formulaic ways to make "good enough" and "catchy enough" songs, but the window for "X enough" keeps shifting. Cranking out grunge won't be sustainable in the age of K-pop.
But the massive runaway hits have been predominantly outliers for their age. They have veered far enough from the mainstream to be interesting in new ways, different enough, and surprising enough to break through.
But to predict in advance what kinds of outliers will win the lottery? Largely random, indeed.
From another angle, a bunch of us in the tech sector made pretty nice salaries. Very few of us were really all-stars in the sense that everyone knew who we we were on YouTube, etc. Which was fine.
Not that I believe its easy, nor do I think AI will be super good at it, at least not before everything else also enshittifies into the habsburg-AI-powered dead internet.
A good AI girlfriend wouldn't be a therapist but would mimics every aspect of a girlfriend, including arguments and fights and makeups, because that's how bonding occurs. That's going to be how successful AI girlfriend will be made.
There are a few key points to understanding the OnlyFans business which are not covered by either article (and the one on xsrus.com is pretty old and is off by several billions regarding revenue now).
* Point #1, OnlyFans is the biggest thing in porn by far, its rise is meteoric.
* Point #2, OnlyFans is in the business of selling relationships. It's not a tech company and attempts to analyze it as such are therefore off the mark. Customers pay OnlyFans because they feel they are obtaining a relationship with the model, that she is aware of them and responding to them in a personalized fashion.
* Point #3, The relationships OnlyFans sells are fraudulent - a high percentage of customers actually believe they are talking to the model. In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced. Some models run their own accounts but most of the time it is more professionalized with a pimp/production company behind the scenes who just orders pictures and clips from the model, so the intimacy the customer is buying is a lie.
* Point #4, and this may be the biggest one explaining OF's meteoric rise, OF creators are allowed to advertise via their social media profiles, whereas a conventional porn site is not. Reddit, X and Instagram are all massive drivers of OnlyFans traffic and signups. The business model is that softcore porn is hosted on these social media sites, which makes tons of money for the social media sites, and then there is a link or mention to the OnlyFans profile where OF delivers the service for whales who want to escalate their porn consumption.
I'll say it again, the key innovation in the OnlyFans business model is that they figured out how to get women to advertise their service on Instagram. Not a tech company.
Another significant takeaway is that since OF's product is fundamentally a lie, the social media giants are indirectly profiting from fraud.
> In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced
It depends how you define “successful”, but I would say that’s not true. I personally know several OF models for whom it is their fulltime job (earning decent money), and they do not outsource anything. Highly popular models almost certainly do, but there’s a lot of smaller creators who don’t
> Point #2, OnlyFans is in the business of selling relationships [...] Customers pay OnlyFans because they feel they are obtaining a relationship with the model,
Is there any hard evidence this is true beyond a tiny deluded fraction of the userbase?
Aren't 99% of users just straightforwardly transactional, trading money for access to photos and videos, just like subscribing to a newspaper?
To what extent is the current content being paid for on onlyfans "real content?"
There are companies that you can pay to manage your onlyfans messages[1]. As in- people think they are messaging the content creator, but are actually messaging some random employee of a third party company. I'm not sure how many of the people paying to message the content creator understand that this is common, but I'd imagine some are willfully ignorant about who is replying to their messages. Couldn't they also be similarly "blind" when interfacing with an AI substitute?
Sure, real content will fetch a premium, but I think there is absolute bank to be made with AI enhanced or AI generated curated pornography in our near future.
I will also not be surprised at all when the inevitable scandal breaks where some popular OF creator was ousted as being AI generated instead of being "real".
There are Instagram influences that are on the platform /today/ that are immensely popular, and they are completely AI generated. Some of their followers even know this, yet they don't really care.
This was a minor point in the Diamond Age novel. Artificial intelligence is capable of acting in digital movies, but is still imperceptibly off. Requires a real human being to give that extra bit of authenticity.
It’s already fake. The creator is not really into you and your interactions are with some dude in an offshore call center, not intimate chats with the person you think you’re having. It’s ridiculous this is considered okay by the platform.
Unlike something like professional wrestling (that is make believe real content), the AI equivalent to only fans seems like it will be trivial to make.
And as the article pointed out, part of why onlyfans exploded in popularity is that other sources of free porn dried up, so it shows there is a substitution aspect where if something better / cheaper comes along, people will switch to it.
Further, different audiences are looking for different things.
One other response mentions social status.
I will contribute another: personal human interaction with someone that seems both "out of your league" AND "no-need-to-get-away-from-the-computer" available. That configuration has significant value (as real content from a real human) for enough of these fans, enough of which recognize this and pay well for it - to make it worth the performer's time. And still very far from "generative AI".
>When (AI is) mentioned it has a negative correlation.
I have an llm inference rig that I enjoy on the weekends and the problem for the first time in my life is that I have supernormal stimulus which doesn't seem to reduce in potency the more I use it.
It's gotten to the point where I don't visit porn sites any more because the locally generated material is better than what I can find there, and these are just the first sparks of gen AI porn.
Gen AI porn will make the issue of online pornography seem laughable when it drops in requirements so you can run the state of the art models in prosumer hardware.
What do you do when reality is a distant second to the digital world?
> I have an llm inference rig that I enjoy on the weekends and the problem for the first time in my life it that I have supernormal stimulus which doesn't seem to reduce in potency the more I use it.
That's what going to turn our society upside down before we realise what we're dealing with. Sex is a lot like doing drugs that as a side effect make you release your life energy. The same energy that creates new life in the right circumstances. In the nature, obtaining sex is difficult, which limits the amount of this sex drug we can consume. AI removes this "obstacle" from our way and opens the gates to such dungeons of our mind that we thought never existed. The effect at the society level will be a giant short-circuit when the electric energy that makes our bodies alive will rush down and burn the wires.
What I find fascinating/disturbing with OnlyFans and in some way with Twitch and streaming in general is more the client side than the creators. Here are basically people paying, and paying a lot, for parasocial relationships. Because clearly it’s not about the content per see which is a dim a dozen and available for free in trove.
I think it says something quite dark about our society as a whole that we have basically commoditised distress and are encouraging some people often themselves in dire circumstances to prey on others to the benefits of the middle men. I find these new pimps scarier than the old sort in that they pretend to have clean hands.
> Because clearly it’s not about the content per see which is a dim a dozen and available for free in trove.
I think you should step back and look at it with a bit of distance. Is the content they're paying for really the same as you think is available for free, and do they even get it under the same conditions, in morality and circumstance.
Not knowing your life, it feels like you could have said the same towards people buying pricy concert tickets when there's royalty free music abundantly available.
> commoditised distress [...] often in dire situations
The first step to alleviate these specific situations could be to stop marginalizing this kind of content and give them a regular professional status, instead of systematicly pigeon hole it.
> it feels like you could have said the same towards people buying pricy concert tickets when there's royalty free music abundantly available.
The analogy holds. Most people don't pay concert tickets for the music itself. It's the experience, the crowd, the physical presence of the artists, etc.
But the OP is right about the parasocial aspect. OF content and other such platforms is about the personalization aspect. Sure, there's some kinks/fetishes too.. but it is primarily about engagement. In some ways, it's just an explicit, subscription based, social media platform where it feels like you're being treated uniquely... But most times you are not.
> Not knowing your life, it feels like you could have said the same towards people buying pricy concert tickets when there's royalty free music abundantly available.
Wow, What a great analogy. That really is almost the same except not with music but sexual attraction.
If OnlyFans is really paying 80% of gross to creators, it seems that any kind of "regular professional status" would be worse for them, at least for the top 10%.
> The first step to alleviate these specific situations could be to stop marginalizing this kind of content and give them a regular professional status, instead of systematicly pigeon hole it
I dislike arguments made in this vein, it's sortof a way to intellectually dismiss someone's point without addressing it.
I share the grandparent poster's concern. Parasocial relationships feed us in a certain way, but do not nourish.
Don't get me wrong; I'd rather have OnlyFans than pimps. But that's not the point.
It's way worse in the case of YouTube/Twitch than OnlyFans IMO. People have been paying for pornography/sex for millennia. It's just part of human nature. On the other hand an 11 year old throwing money at MrBeast...why?
While I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, the specific example you used is not really relevant: MrBeast is not on twitch, and his revenue comes from youtube ads and brand partnerships. He also has 'classic' merch and several companies (burgers, chocolate bars), but he doesn't bring in any money from subscriptions/donations the way twitch streamers or onlyfan creators do.
Same reason why kids have paid for Transformers merch, Star Wars merch, band merch, etc.
It's a brand, they like it, they want to be reminded of it and show their love of it off. It creates an "in group" which is socially valuable. Streamers are nothing special in that regard.
You can get porn anywhere. The selling point of OnlyFans is specifically the parasocial connection. These people are paying money to exchange DM’s with LLM’s and third world gig workers pretending to be their favorite porn star.
The vast majority of people will not have ever paid for porn or sex though. Sure sexual indulgement in some form is human nature, but it always is a special group that uses such direct or indirect services.
This view isn't matched by the stats. I have a friend who is a successful OF model and only a fraction of one percent of her subscribers ever DM her. A lot of them subscribe, see what they want and then immediately delete their accounts. There's no apparent relationship between her fans and her, for the most part.
Parasocial relationships don't require interaction, you could just watch a twitch streamer a lot. I think if we defined it by requiring interaction we would underestimate the percieved impact of these social phenomenon.
>subscribe ... and then immediately delete their accounts
Sounds like credit card fraud to me. Bots using stolen cards to scrape OF content. Also easily verifies that the number works before attempting a pricier purchase.
You mention that OPs conclusion Doesn't align with the stats, but then you only provide a single data point. Are there other stats that you were referring to?
> I have a friend who is a successful OF model and only a fraction of one percent of her subscribers ever DM her.
I have a friend who produces a few successful OF models and makes about 5-10x a good SF tech salary. He has a whole army of sexters who impersonate models and DM with fans. Vast majority of his income comes not from subscriptions, but from content sold in these DMs, content which is presented as "exclusive" to the buyer.
The shocking part is how new generation have a fully rational reinterpretation of all this, they call it "ethical sex". It's beautiful to them (probably in contrast to the boat loads of issues IRL social and intimate relationships can bring with them). And anything not aligned with their view causes a lot of angry arguments.
The circle of life. People said the same thing about Playboy when it first came out, about Internet porn when it first came out… People have been “falling in love” with strippers for as long as strippers have existed. In many ways OF feels like a positive step because it allows the removal of toxic middlemen that stand between the model and their customer.
To my mind the bigger issue is how much of it is a total scam. OF models offshoring their DM responses so their clients think they’re having conversations with the model when it’s actually some dude half the world away. Or using AI for the same, which I’m sure is increasing exponentially.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when AI is able to generate on demand video/photo and chat that’s realistic enough to satisfy an online client. If people are specifically told it’s AI will they be content with that? Or will they still want an actual real human? We're not exactly rational creatures at the best of times so it’ll be fascinating to see. We’ll have gone from the phone sex lines of yore, where you are interacting with a real human even though they’re definitely not the human you’re imagining in your head, to an AI video chat where you’re seeing exactly what you want but there’s nothing behind it.
The younger generation has a weird relationship with the physical reality of sexuality, I expect because so much has been perfection-optimized in media portrayals of it, post-~2000.
If you go back and watch <= 90s movies and tv (PG-13!), it's amazing how pervasive and frank sexuality there is.^
In contrast to current mores that mandate sexy, but never actually talking about sex.
The deterioration of more honest discourse in mass media about realistic (read: fumbling, awkward, funny, vulnerable, spiritual) physical sexuality has left young folks ill prepared to enjoy that side of life.
^ Exhibit A: Hercules the Legendary Journeys (1994, produced by Sam Raimi!) S01E02, which would make most kids today cringe, despite just being scantily-clad depictions of consensual sexual desire and bawdy banter https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgz7burclcI
> The shocking part is how new generation have a fully rational reinterpretation of all this, they call it "ethical sex". It's beautiful to them (probably in contrast to the boat loads of issues IRL social and intimate relationships can bring with them). And anything not aligned with their view causes a lot of angry arguments.
Do you have a source for that angrily defended "fully rational reinterpretation"?
I suspect the word for what's going on is rationalization not "fully rational reinterpretation" (e.g. "This is a thing we're doing, therefore it's good because we do it. Let's reevaluate everything else to achieve that result.").
Every generation shockingly reinterprets things. Our generation "shockingly" interprets a mixed race couple kissing on TV as normal, instead of obscene enough to be banned.
I'd be fascinated to see an ethnological elaboration of this concept, but nothing's turning up so far - not surprising, I think, but I wonder if you could point to something.
I have an onlyfans and I constantly see people talking about this parasocial relationship thing and how people are managing accounts. Maybe for the big people but I know a lot of onlyfans models by way of working in the industry for 20 years. My first sysadmin job was for a porn company where I interacted with talent a lot. I don't know anyone amateur with social media management.
Anyway, a lot of people who have never used the site before think it's mostly what you said. It's not. The parasocial stuff is tiny unless you're doing specific kinks for people.
What I tell most people not familiar with the industry is that it's usually more like seeing someone in real life (NOT a porn star, celeb, etc, amateurs only) that you've got a crush on naked for only $10/mo. It has the amateur thing a lot of people love. Another reddit comment is always "Why pay when porn is free?" Have you never had a crush on someone? And amateur porn is probably the biggest "kink" I feel weird even calling it a kink, I'm practically on the "who doesnt like amateur porn??" end.
That's 90% of the customers. Lots of people who think a youtuber or instagram or whatever not professionally showing themselves off is just hot and want to see them naked.
I've never spoken to a single customer. I'm a straight man and most of mine are men and I have no interest or desperation for money to do para/kink stuff.
I really don't get why so many people think onlyfans is about messaging talent back and forth. It's kind of annoying to constantly read because it always comes from non-OF users who have this weird morality/ethics problem with sex work. It makes no sense if you know anything about porn. Most people jack off in silence and close their laptop and there aren't thousands of onlyfans models with media managers. Most are 18-25yo women who work corporate jobs or bartenders and have their own life to live. They treat it like youtube, upload content a few times a week and never look at messages.
Don't kink shame, stop with the "I don't know why anyone uses this instead of that, you're a loser if you pay for porn" thing. You like what you like, other people like what they like.
I feel this way about strip clubs. I’m pretty libertine and think that if you can make money dancing naked, more power to ya, but the few times I’ve been dragged to a strip club all I can focus on is the clientele who as you say largely seem to be chasing this dark, parasocial connection that can never be what they need it to be.
Burlesque shows are a 100% more fun than an actual strip club especially if they incorporate some good ol slapstick vaudeville routines in between the strip teases. The audience is also way less greasy.
We’re the cohort putting our hand on the stove to remember you get burned.
Vices like gambling, obscenity, prostitution, drugs, etc are banned or heavily controlled societies over because they have significant negative cultural effects. “Why do YOU care what other people do in their private lives?” was always a stupid justification: if everyone in your community is addicted to vices, that DOES affect me.
Yet humans have fared mostly fine as a whole with even a moderate level of those things, legal or not, consistently happening throughout history and cultures. The biggest problem we have is when these vices are driven underground so the vice itself is conflated with the additional risk of having to put one’s self in a dangerous situation to engage with it.
Looking at western culture (the only one I feel confident speaking about), we are still bound by puritanical values that were imposed as control mechanisms but managed to sneak their way into a set of cultural norms as a moral code despite their actual value to us not being evaluated and actively selected.
A better justification is, "prove that it's actually harmful using sources other than your gut", and "suggest a method for controlling it that doesn't almost immediately devolve into puritan witch-hunting, racism, and/or misogyny."
> Vices like gambling, obscenity, prostitution, drugs, etc are banned or heavily controlled societies over because they have significant negative cultural effects
Do they? Citation needed. So far it seems that marijuana consumption leads to far less violence than alcohol, and proliferation of porn leads to much lower rates of sexual violence.
> if everyone in your community is addicted to vices, that DOES affect me
Then choose and manage your own community, but don't push this view on the whole country. Dozens of millions of people (I don't know what country do you live in, so not sure about the population) are not a "community" that you can put under the same norms. If you think that porn is bad, it's your right to do so, and to find likeminded people to build a community that shares these values. But why would you want to force it on other people?
> clearly it’s not about the content per see which is a dim a dozen and available for free in trove.
The free stuff isn't always as good, especially if you want something of a specific niche (fursuits, cosplay, etc). A lot of creators only upload cut-down vidros or "trailers" to free sites with a link to their OF.
At least in my case, I simply see it like the Patreon model. I like supporting some of my favorite artists, especially with something like an ongoing comic series I'll get previews of and vote on polls to influence. Onlyfans is the same if I particularly like some creator. It's great that we can directly support content creators of all kinds now.
> [...] for parasocial relationships. Because clearly it’s not about the content per see which is a dim a dozen and available for free in trove.
I think you're making assumptions about people's motivations that aren't consistent with evidence.
Pornhub and similar sites are full of content that is a dime a dozen and available for free and does not suggest any kind of "parasocial" relationship with the viewer. It's just two or more people fucking. And it's the same as it was ten years ago. And yet... More of that content keeps being made. Porn production companies exist. Pornstars making money for fucking on camera exist. Clearly there are people willing to pay for new porn that will just end up on free-to-view sites anyway.
Your mental model of "it's all about the parasocial relationship" doesn't explain these facts. Thus your mental model can't be the whole truth. I suspect it's at most a fairly small part of the truth.
I think OP's point is that people aren't (directly) paying for Pornhub, although I realize some people are paying some site that make porn, but the amounts remain smaller than what people pay directly on OF.
It is equally disturbing if museums see themselves forced to to move to forced to only fans in protest because of prudish US corps governing the web [0]. I think if there would be more middle ground it would be less of a business model.
It's particularly bad with Twitch and YouTube streams IMHO. The economics and experience of being in a large stream chat is depressing.
The entire system is geared around feeling unheard, unseen and paying to be heard or seen.
20k people shouting into a a void. Paying to get a badge signaling you subscribed. Paying to highlight messages hoping they are read. Hanging on for that hope this popular person gives you 10 seconds of attention.
That's the reality of the depressing industry. And that's how the streamers and steaming providers like it. Ever wonder why the stream chat experience has never been improved? ;)
> I find these new pimps scarier than the old sort in that they pretend to have clean hands
The old one does. And I disagree this is worse, as it’s probably just you never encounter the old model yourself or not knowing the history enough to do the comparison. From the book I read, across cultures and societies, old model of pimping is very brutal, on both the client and the server sides.
You could say that about anything related to the internet. But yes when shown extreme examples it’s obvious how unokay it is.
As a person who tried to start a startup but had been hacked and assaulted by the organizations who seem to maintain their monopoly by whatever methods they can use it’s more like a mob of pimps than a single pimp.
It’s crazy right!? Sex sells everywhere.
I’ve read or listend to a idea that because sex is strongly regulated in the US there is more happening in the hidden.
Edit: Maybe there is a correlation between Gamers and Porn.
> clearly it’s not about the content per see which is a dim a dozen and available for free in trove.
I think there is a darker side there: many of those subscribers are minors, who discover this kind of content for the first time. That's why OF models stream on Twitch to expand their audience, there are plenty of kids who came there for Minecraft, but will end up subscribing to OF with mom's credit card.
So we should have a service, instead, that pairs up horny teenagers or puts them in group settings where they can explore their sexuality in a more directly social way? Or what do you suggest, that they don’t have an outlet for these urges?
Although Onlyfans is certainly more exploitative, I would argue that this concept of one-way parasocial relationships has existed since basically the dawn of humanity and likely has roots to our earliest fundamental tribalistic nature.
I mean look at the extremely popular K-pop bands, fans get insanely invested into these groups, following them, bringing glowsticks to show support, etc. Or the entire Japanese idol movement for that matter.
Or think about how people stand in line for hours just to get the signature of somebody at a convention.
I think this is just the way a lot of people are wired. I don't know if it's bad or a good thing, it's just something I've noticed.
You say one-way parasocial relationships have existed since basically the dawn of humanity, but all the examples you give are of things that have only become popular in, generously, the last century.
I do remember a study that people often think label their more popular friends as their "best" friends, but if you go ask THOSE friends, they label THEIR even more popular friends as their "BEST" friends. It's often asymmetrical.
Though tbh going too far down these rabbitholes usually isn't healthy/productive imo.
Or how nerds are willing to argue about the superiority of Linux vs Mac vs Windows while having only faint notions of how to use each to their fullest extent or the workings of their internals. We on HN aren't immune from unthinking tribalism.
I don’t think it’s new per see nor that OnlyFans is unique in this. The K-pop exemple you bring forward is good and I guess you could see the Hollywood star system as a kind of precursor.
I still think there are multiple differences.
One is how OnlyFans has successfully turned everyday people into this source of para-social fixation for a multitude of small communities and somehow massified the issue.
The other and the main one for me is that in both the star system or the K-pop industry the system is a mean to an end - selling movie tickets or albums - while OnlyFans genuinely sells the illusion of closeness.
A more accurate description I think is that "we" have bifurcated. It's another element of political division.
Almost everyone I know thinks that things like OnlyFans are embarrassing at best, and disgusting at worst. Sure, most of us look at porn, but admitting that you've paid for it and _especially_ admitting that you have a "favourite camgirl" or whatever would be properly cringe.
I think it also is quite a special demographic, which is hard to nail down. There are a lot of people that don't have many social contacts but would never pay anyone for only fans. Perhaps you need to have a special character trait to be able to use such services.
But while there are successful people on only fans with either more or less clothes on, the vast majority of creators probably sell their dignity for a few dollars.
Agreed that there is something fishy about these new pimps. I guess there are still the conventional pimps too, but they now call themselves manager.
This framing, "sell their dignity", is your moral judgement (coming from your cultural, religious, or some other) background.
I don't see it as any less dignified than any other work. You sell your labor to someone who pays you less than the value it produces.
Now, if you want to argue that median creators get payed only a tiny fraction of their time, and like Twitch/YouTube it's a losing game for most, then we're on the same page.
The disturbing societal implications speak for themselves. Personally, I suspect a significant fraction of transactions on Only Fans or “influencer” platforms are money laundering or social engineering campaigns by deeply resourced actors. There may be a large number of clients that are bots making random subscriptions to keep the network alive and large enough to make moving targeted funds harder to observe.
A plausible scenario might be an FBI agent paying a confidential informant without creating an unexplained income stream. The FBI and friends disclosed spending around $0.5B on informants. The truth could be more. We don’t know what other agencies around the world spend. I imagine they aren’t putting cash in brown bags under park benches.
To clarify, in this scenario, the confidential informant would be a streamer or an influencer - a person that has a sizeable following, operates in public, and creates a lot of attention? And that there's a large network of such informants and none of them were compromised (had their true nature exposed in public)?
You would be surprised how many people pay for OF content. The novelty is that the clients are picked using mainstream social media. Most actually believe they talk with the influencer while in reality the “influencer” doesn’t even know where its content is distributed(not that she cares). Chatters and voice-overs are the norm.
I have a buddy how likes to tell how he "had the idea for Onlyfans first" but I advised him not to pursue it.
The reality is that OnlyFans wasn't the first to try this model. You have to give them credit for successfully building the business, especially with several close calls between them and government regulations.
Yeah, I'm sure millions of people had this idea. My friends and I talked about it at some point as well.
The problem is the payment processor. How the heck do you accept adult-content related payments? That is the hardest problem to solve when it comes to these things in my book.
Payment is the hardest part in this space. Somehow OnlyFans had the privilege to use Stripe for all their transactions.
It's beyond knowing the business model, I guess the founder were at the right place and right time and knew the right people to make this venture succeed.
Also, the marketing, how the heck did these guy blow up so fast. The funds for marketing and all, it's not cheap!
Payment processing for porn has existed a long time. The problem is trying to convince people to pay for porn. The assumption was free tube site would replace membership sites, as the was the trend already.
Recently they've tried to launch OFTV to try and build up more regular (non-spicy) paid content, but it's a tiny fraction of their revenue I would imagine.
Onlyfans is more than porn. DMs with your "star" (her assistant), exclusive content, and other parasocial interactions create a kind of connection that is a lot deeper than just porn.
When you can combine that experience with AI generated content, you will create something that I don't think anyone fully understands the ramifications of yet.
> Usually, such a ban would destroy a media platforms’ business model, but browser-based experiences are fine for viewing photos and videos and sending messages (in contrast, most games can’t even run). And while apps tend to offer better user experiences and far simpler payment processes, most OnlyFans customers aren’t dissuaded by the need to use a browser, nor the extra hoops involved in manually entering a credit card number
This is a baffling section where the author goes out of their way to bash browsers vs apps. Maybe there are a lot of cons to apps that browsers don't have. Basically all of the sleights against browsers in this section are not true. When I buy something from amazon, from my browser, I definitely do not need to manually enter my credit card in every time.
People are always so defensive of this stuff but the metrics at any company will show you users are more engaged and convert better in apps than on web by a lot. While the individual claims might not be true for an individual browser experience, the average brings down the whole and users still hold the perception that apps are easier to use. It is why companies continue to invest despite mobile being a PITA.
I don't know that there are that many downsides to apps for users. Certainly as an iPhone owner I get little anxiety about installing apps from Apple's app store[0] and, for the most part, they offer a good experience - often better than the web. The ones that don't, I simply uninstall.
Cost can be a downside, of course.
For vendors the obvious downside is the Apple/Google tax, and is something even we need to be wary of at the company I work for.
But it's not the only downside.
I work for a company that offers a service via the web but, recently, we wanted to prototype some functionality that would exclusively be used from mobile and tablet. It uses the camera, does some nifty stuff with AI (and, to be clear, no, it's not a porn app!), etc., and I thought well, why not prototype it with and app? And, furthermore, why not prototype it as a native app with Swift? This should be the lowest friction route to ddeveloping and deploying an app to iOS, has full access to the platform's extensive built-in capabilities, and therefore it would offer the best user experience, etc.
And I've always been happy to sacrifice a quantity of developer convenience for the sake of offering a better user experience. At the end of the day if we, as engineers, wanted easy jobs we picked the wrong career: we should be aiming to make the lives of our users easier and more productive, and that's often really challenging.
And I'll tell you what: as far as it goes, if I didn't need the app to interact with anything outside of Apple's platform I might still use Swift. It's a nice language, and whilst XCode feels a bit like it Deloreaned in from 2005, it isn't completely terrible.
But that's not our app. It needs to integrate with a bunch of other services and here is where the pain kicked in. Swift and iOS are absolutely the poor cousins when it comes to library and API support. For so many things I wanted to do libraries were incomplete, and documentation was... well, it ranged from non-existent to wrong in critical aspects.
And because Swift is niche (relatively speaking) it's very evident that it doesn't have the kind of mature ecosystem, thought leadership or best practices around it that the likes of C++, Java, C#, Python, and others do. I might be speaking out of turn here but I also get the vibe that it doesn't attract the kind of best of breed practitioners that other more niche development platforms have, which yields better library and API support for them even though they don't necessarily have huge developer bases: think Go, Rust, Flutter, etc.
I don't want to denigrate Swift because, as a language in isolation, I liked it (even though it's Objective C underpinnings are never far from showing themselves). But as a development experience, it was a complete nightmare. Outside of functionality that depended only on the device itself I struggled to get anything working well.
You could put this down to, well, you're new to the platform, what do you expect? But I was able to otherwise be immediately productive in Python 18 months ago when I started working with it, and didn't run into these kinds of frustrations.
In the end I literally got to the point of, screw this, let's just use web, or maybe a hybrid app with the thinnest of thin native wrappers, or maybe flutter. But not native, no way.
[0] I say little anxiety rather than no anxiety because I'm not generally a fan of free apps the serve ads, where you don't really know what's on the other end, or how they might be tracking you, and often the UX is such that it's made a bit easier than one might ideally like to accidentally click an ad.
> The company counted an average of only 42 employees in 2023, down from 61 two years earlier. During the year, it generated $31MM in net revenue per employee (13-28x that of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and $15.5MM in operating profit (27-560x).
This is the wildest part. One company that is proving all the "why does <company> need 10000 engineers?" takes true.
> This is the wildest part. One company that is proving all the "why does <company> need 10000 engineers?" takes true.
Generally speaking, <company> needs <number> engineers because it's rational to keep hiring while each incremental engineer generates more value than they cost in salary and overhead, even if some of those engineers are at less than 50% utilisation and have to generate pointless make-work for themselves to get past performance review.
that sounds like a path to an unsustainable situation where your company is run by socially adept fratboys and charismatic politicians instead of hackers, with company leadership insulated from actual facts on the ground by many layers of middle managers with strong incentives to lie? even if those incremental engineers are generating more value at first, they won't be able to continue doing so when most of the company exists to defend their pointless make-work. the people who leave first won't be the ones spending their time on pointless make-work
AWS/GCP/Azure manage physical data centers across the globe, and includes hundreds of services/offerings on each platform.
Additionally, critical industries (hospitals, banks, airlines) often rely on these companies to be available/resilient at all times. Thus the need for increased global workforce. OF on the other hand, nobody is going to die if they can’t access the feet pics they bought for a few minutes or days.
It does not. These companies do not even work in the same problem space. Amazon works in retail, cloud, book publishing, etc. Microsoft maintains their own cloud as well and a complete operating system.
At least compare it to companies with similar businesses. I would argue twitch seems closer. I think they had over 1000 employees. You would have a better point with that comparison if you would want to make that argument.
I'm going to say more or less the same thing in a different way. As you scale up to do more and different things, your efficiency at some level is going to go down. Maybe way down.
My gut feeling is this number doesn't match our assumptions.
For instance moderation and community management alone must be a huge pool of people. While the content and comments can be adult, they'll need to deal with all the payment related back and forth, including chargebacks, legal inquiries etc. Same for doxxing, underage filtering, spam and so on.
I assume most if not all of it is a different company which isn't counted in the 42 employees.
Of course engineering can be treated the same, with sub-contracting companies dealing with the actual running of the service or part of the developement.
They mention having hundreds of contractors. Just because workers aren't full time employees doesn't mean they don't work for the company. Construction and sales are often done by "independent contractors". This reduces the requirements for the employers, working around many labor laws like overtime and paid leave. Google is known for doing this a lot.
Revenue per employee isn't a useful metric here IMHO.
If Company A sells $100M of televisions which they imported for $95M they've made $5M in profit.
If Company B sells $100M of search ads which they served for $1M they've made $99M in profit.
From a revenue perspective they're equal - but $1M invested in Company A produces a 5% return on investment, while the same $1M invested in Company B has a 9900% ROI.
The quoted section is about net revenue, which in this article means total revenue minus the payouts to creators. In other worse, revenue minus COGS. It's a valid comparison.
Where labor costs really start to skyrocket is when you start trying to moderate content and keep the porn bots from invading your site. OF probably spends little in doing this. It is remarkable that they've been able to keep their payment processors happy despite the distinct possibility that a number of the performers are underage and a huge legal liability. Clearly with a staff that small they aren't doing the most extensive background checks.
OF makes one product, and that product is maintaining a particular platform, that's why they don't need tons of engineers. They've just got to be a more attractive platform than their competition, and the money keeps coming in.
So this is a VC writing, observing that they have a stable, profitable business model. Creators get 80% of revenue, which is pretty good. It creates a moat - nobody taking a bigger cut is likely to get the desirable talent. Most of the creators don't make much, which is normal for creative industries. Music and books work that way.
OnlyFans has only about 42 employees. They didn't hire a bloated staff. That's impressive considering the sheer volume of content that passes through their servers.
It looks like OnlyFans has figured out how to do the porno business in a more or less legit way. So what's the problem?
problem? ball seems to approve, terming it 'stunning', 'probably the most successful uk company founded since deepmind', 'the most significant media platform founded since tiktok', and says that on onlyfans 'creators and pornstars alike can make more money, in a safer way, while having greater autonomy and offering audiences experiences that feel more authentic, differentiated, and valuable'
were you replying to someone else making a comment attacking onlyfans?
As an aside: OnlyFans 80% revenue share rate is practical only because it does not offer App Store-based billing (which would take 15-30% of revenue off the top). In fact, neither iOS App Store nor Google’s Play Store even allow for pornographic apps. Usually, such a ban would destroy a media platforms’ business model, but browser-based experiences are fine for viewing photos and videos and sending messages (in contrast, most games can’t even run). And while apps tend to offer better user experiences and far simpler payment processes, most OnlyFans customers aren’t dissuaded by the need to use a browser, nor the extra hoops involved in manually entering a credit card number (again, this is less true for casual games or ecommerce).
IMO the lede is a bit buried within the article. The idea that a non-app could survive this well within the strangling iOS system should come as a revelation to the greater iOS community.
Readit News
With traditional adult entertainment, creators are aware of the social ramifications (e.g., social stigma, familial ostracism, difficulty dealing with the future, and so on), and there is a decent theoretical economic framework to measure that.
I am not sure if there's the same this new army of "civilians" joining OF, let alone the additional toll it will take on the creators in terms of social ostracism, future prospects, future opportunities, and mental health.
A few decades ago, there weren't that many "productions", performers were much fewer and some porn performers name were known by anyone, regardless if you had seen porn with them staring or not. A person getting out of the business and trying to make a new career would have a high chance of meeting people, especially men, in real life who might have seen at least one movie.
Nowadays pornhub and onlyfans are flooded by wannabee independent performers. Even the most addicted to porn can't possibly follow and keep track of more than a tiny subset of performers. So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
This is dangerously wrong coming at least a decade after there are entire communities devoted to unmasking performers’ real identities and multiple reverse image search tools exist as apparent businesses. That used to be a human-driven practice - I first heard about it coverage of the Chinese internet mobs from the perspective of victims of misidentification - but like everything else it’s reportedly adopting AI. Here’s a story which got a bit of discussion a few years back:
https://thenextweb.com/news/creepy-programmer-builds-ai-algo...
One of the big things to remember is that these systems don’t need to be perfect, or even close, to cause harm. Even if they were only 10% accurate, that’s still a lot of people living with the question of whether the person they just met knows or whether today is the day some nut sent those links to HR. You can’t rely on getting lost in the crowd any more.
Your model of "social ramifications" seems to assume no one ever talks to anyone else, which is dead wrong. So to see problems, the only thing that needs to happen is one person needs to see their porn out of maybe the 1000 people who could recognize the performer IRL, then a rumor starts and a significant fraction of the 1000 (and more people besides) find out. No fame required.
Then the problem can balloon if another person out of that 1000 is angry with the performer, and decides to dox them by creating a website or posting that explicitly outs them to anyone who searches their name on Google.
Then, on top of that, there's all the facial recognition tech that's floating around, which is basically a "go strait to jail, to not pass go" thing.
I think the odds of getting recognized were a bit lower for me being a male, my peak live viewership was a little over 1k viewers. A video of me also got reposted and featured on PornHub gay and was able to accumulate ~100k views before I was able to get it taken down. There are still plenty of videos around that I wasn't able to get taken down but the big sites like PornHub respect DMCA takedown requests.
Regarding getting recognized, I think you are somewhat right but it likely still happens. I had 2 people recognize me in person, only 1 found my real name because they recognized me at my college graduation. Nothing came of it besides them trying to add me on FaceBook. I think for girls they would be more likely to get recognized if they are successful because they get a lot more viewers.
I was lucky that nobody that did recognize me posted anywhere about what my real name is since that would be a way to find the videos of me when people search my real name. I think that is probably the biggest risk with performing is that if that association happens, it would probably be hard to wipe that association from the internet. One way out of it for women though is that they could take their spouses last name when they get married, their new name wouldn't be associated with the old porn name.
I have told people in my life about that past job. It had no impact on any of those relationships and never really came up again. So if it did come up again, I don't think it would have much impact on my life. In my mind, sex work is real work and those who do it should not be shamed for doing it.
I have no comment on the morals and ethics but as far as modern technology goes; most if not all of OnlyFans finds its way to darkweb | pirate | hoarder megasites where there's always a few because-we-can obsessed techlords training facial recognition, gait recognition, and seeding AI generated VR porn engines, etc.
We can be certain that any woman with an OnlyFans portfolio will face that being dragged up later in their life if they are at all slightly public.
They do have the modern available hand wave explaination of "deepfake by weird ex" that becomes more and more believable each passing day.
also most of the camgirls i know in real life block access to people who live in the same country as they (and i) do; that greatly reduces the chance of awkward dialogues with long-distant uncles at the next family reunion
Is it such a big problem nowadays as it used to be? My impression is that society in general, and younger people in particular, have become more tolerant of such things; at least in Northern Europe.
I’m an old married guy, but I can’t imagine dating and then finding out that the person you were involved with was doing that type of thing. In a friend group I wouldn’t even blink.
Based on the conversations I see, this seems to be a common experience.
I think you're just projecting.
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The idea that someone shouldn't be hired for a job because they have/had an OF is puritanism plain and simple.
I expect that fewer people actually care about the "morality" and simply want to use morals as a weapon against women in the workplace.
As a hiring manager, if anything I'd want to consider sex performers as a green flag in a job history. Speaks to resourcefulness, social skills, courage and self confidence.
It adds risk that another hire may not have.
This is why in general it is frowned upon by "certain members of society" as you call them.
Some forms are a lot more taxing on both mental and physical health (plus STD risk). OF doesn't have this same level of risk but people mentally lump it all together
The morals are there for a reason, they just lack nuance
Japan's actually got the least-worst birthrates among Far East, and everyone knows what it's best known for on the Internet.
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I don't know why you say this, as it is laughably untrue. The porn industry has ALWAYS filled itself with very very young women who were assured (by liars) their family and friends and coworkers wouldn't see it, promised they wouldn't have to do certain things that they then get pressured and bullied into doing, and giving the women zero control over the produced media, how it is represented, how THEY are represented, and how it is portrayed to the audience.
There's an immense amount of regret and "I didn't know" in the industry.
I am reminded of the study done on the damaged goods hypothesis, which gave a negative on that hypothesis. Not only did porn actresses not have higher rate of childhood sexual abuse, but they rated higher than the average in terms of self-esteem, positive feelings, and social support. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23167939/)
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Why though? It is an interesting issue when you look closer. For an individual, it's more obvious - I wouldn't like to be with a prostitute because of possible hidden diseases and lack of trust - but there is no way of telling how many sexual contacts my new partner had, whether paid for or not.
But I wouldn't have any problem working with an ex-pro in the same company or team, they would be just a colleague like all the rest, and I can't imagine any adult making any immature comments about the past of any colleagues on my team.
How is that 'fine'?
I would like to see a future where someone doing sex work to make ends meet (or even as a freely chosen profession!) is not ostracised for it. Sex is part of society whether you want it or not, and so is paying for sexual acts.
Somehow it's mainly the ones who sells their body and not the ones who buy them who get punished.
Buying is more often voluntarily than selling.
A large amount of those people are very young, at an age where you don't really pick your options solely on their super long term consequences.
Most people are going to be "stupid" in their early adulthood, failing and adjusting is a big part of it. Unfortunately, some of those decisions will stick more than others and sex work is very sticky (zing).
No, if you sell sex, lots of societies will punish you. Selling or renting your body otherwise -- which a very large share of jobs involve just as much as sex work does -- is otherwise lauded.
> Thats fine, societies have all sorts of norms we all need to learn.
Lots of norms that societies have or historically have had would be better eliminated. That something is an existing norm isn't an argument in favor of it being a norm.
That's how all labor works.
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> It’s just as easy to imagine demand for the “real thing” going down due to the emergence of more substitutes as it is to imagine the premium for parasocial authenticity going up. And yet only Generative AI “creators” will truly do whatever “you” want and only for you. And unlike real ones, they speak in every language and are available at any time (and eventually, in immersive 3D).
Disagree. When (AI is) mentioned it has a negative correlation. Real content will fetch a premium
There is no "formula" for success in the creator economy - the winners are largely random. A better way to look at it is there are 4 million humans out there trying every permutation to crack success, and ~400k actually do it.
Unless you have a sufficiently advanced AI agent that is both varying it's content and it's marketing strategy to the tune of maybe ~1000 different iterations it's unlikely we will see a version of OnlyFans that exists that is majority AI generated.
The "parasocial ai girlfriend" sounds like a flawed premise aswell. OF girls are not therapists - Cardi B, Bhad Bhabie, and others aren't raking in millions because they are good girlfriends (although that is part of the upsell). Social status plays a part in the most successful girls, people seem to subscribe because the creator is popular, especially if she's already built a platform elsewhere.
In short, social status does not have an AI substitute.
That observation has echoes of the music industry - another extremely top-heavy creator business. There are formulaic ways to make "good enough" and "catchy enough" songs, but the window for "X enough" keeps shifting. Cranking out grunge won't be sustainable in the age of K-pop.
But the massive runaway hits have been predominantly outliers for their age. They have veered far enough from the mainstream to be interesting in new ways, different enough, and surprising enough to break through.
But to predict in advance what kinds of outliers will win the lottery? Largely random, indeed.
I think that strongly depends on what you call "the creator economy". For example, on YT it's really mostly skill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2trao6dYw
Not that I believe its easy, nor do I think AI will be super good at it, at least not before everything else also enshittifies into the habsburg-AI-powered dead internet.
* Point #1, OnlyFans is the biggest thing in porn by far, its rise is meteoric.
* Point #2, OnlyFans is in the business of selling relationships. It's not a tech company and attempts to analyze it as such are therefore off the mark. Customers pay OnlyFans because they feel they are obtaining a relationship with the model, that she is aware of them and responding to them in a personalized fashion.
* Point #3, The relationships OnlyFans sells are fraudulent - a high percentage of customers actually believe they are talking to the model. In reality none of the models who are successful have time to talk to fans, everything is outsourced. Some models run their own accounts but most of the time it is more professionalized with a pimp/production company behind the scenes who just orders pictures and clips from the model, so the intimacy the customer is buying is a lie.
* Point #4, and this may be the biggest one explaining OF's meteoric rise, OF creators are allowed to advertise via their social media profiles, whereas a conventional porn site is not. Reddit, X and Instagram are all massive drivers of OnlyFans traffic and signups. The business model is that softcore porn is hosted on these social media sites, which makes tons of money for the social media sites, and then there is a link or mention to the OnlyFans profile where OF delivers the service for whales who want to escalate their porn consumption.
I'll say it again, the key innovation in the OnlyFans business model is that they figured out how to get women to advertise their service on Instagram. Not a tech company.
Another significant takeaway is that since OF's product is fundamentally a lie, the social media giants are indirectly profiting from fraud.
It depends how you define “successful”, but I would say that’s not true. I personally know several OF models for whom it is their fulltime job (earning decent money), and they do not outsource anything. Highly popular models almost certainly do, but there’s a lot of smaller creators who don’t
Is there any hard evidence this is true beyond a tiny deluded fraction of the userbase?
Aren't 99% of users just straightforwardly transactional, trading money for access to photos and videos, just like subscribing to a newspaper?
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/onlyfans-management-agency-c...
I will also not be surprised at all when the inevitable scandal breaks where some popular OF creator was ousted as being AI generated instead of being "real".
There are Instagram influences that are on the platform /today/ that are immensely popular, and they are completely AI generated. Some of their followers even know this, yet they don't really care.
Unlike something like professional wrestling (that is make believe real content), the AI equivalent to only fans seems like it will be trivial to make.
And as the article pointed out, part of why onlyfans exploded in popularity is that other sources of free porn dried up, so it shows there is a substitution aspect where if something better / cheaper comes along, people will switch to it.
One other response mentions social status.
I will contribute another: personal human interaction with someone that seems both "out of your league" AND "no-need-to-get-away-from-the-computer" available. That configuration has significant value (as real content from a real human) for enough of these fans, enough of which recognize this and pay well for it - to make it worth the performer's time. And still very far from "generative AI".
is it possible to write a non-seminal article about onlyfans, though?
I have an llm inference rig that I enjoy on the weekends and the problem for the first time in my life is that I have supernormal stimulus which doesn't seem to reduce in potency the more I use it.
It's gotten to the point where I don't visit porn sites any more because the locally generated material is better than what I can find there, and these are just the first sparks of gen AI porn.
Gen AI porn will make the issue of online pornography seem laughable when it drops in requirements so you can run the state of the art models in prosumer hardware.
What do you do when reality is a distant second to the digital world?
realize it's a torus and wander happily in circles
I have no idea what this sentence means
I think it says something quite dark about our society as a whole that we have basically commoditised distress and are encouraging some people often themselves in dire circumstances to prey on others to the benefits of the middle men. I find these new pimps scarier than the old sort in that they pretend to have clean hands.
I think you should step back and look at it with a bit of distance. Is the content they're paying for really the same as you think is available for free, and do they even get it under the same conditions, in morality and circumstance.
Not knowing your life, it feels like you could have said the same towards people buying pricy concert tickets when there's royalty free music abundantly available.
> commoditised distress [...] often in dire situations
The first step to alleviate these specific situations could be to stop marginalizing this kind of content and give them a regular professional status, instead of systematicly pigeon hole it.
The analogy holds. Most people don't pay concert tickets for the music itself. It's the experience, the crowd, the physical presence of the artists, etc.
Wow, What a great analogy. That really is almost the same except not with music but sexual attraction.
I dislike arguments made in this vein, it's sortof a way to intellectually dismiss someone's point without addressing it.
I share the grandparent poster's concern. Parasocial relationships feed us in a certain way, but do not nourish.
Don't get me wrong; I'd rather have OnlyFans than pimps. But that's not the point.
It's a brand, they like it, they want to be reminded of it and show their love of it off. It creates an "in group" which is socially valuable. Streamers are nothing special in that regard.
Sounds like credit card fraud to me. Bots using stolen cards to scrape OF content. Also easily verifies that the number works before attempting a pricier purchase.
I have a friend who produces a few successful OF models and makes about 5-10x a good SF tech salary. He has a whole army of sexters who impersonate models and DM with fans. Vast majority of his income comes not from subscriptions, but from content sold in these DMs, content which is presented as "exclusive" to the buyer.
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To my mind the bigger issue is how much of it is a total scam. OF models offshoring their DM responses so their clients think they’re having conversations with the model when it’s actually some dude half the world away. Or using AI for the same, which I’m sure is increasing exponentially.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when AI is able to generate on demand video/photo and chat that’s realistic enough to satisfy an online client. If people are specifically told it’s AI will they be content with that? Or will they still want an actual real human? We're not exactly rational creatures at the best of times so it’ll be fascinating to see. We’ll have gone from the phone sex lines of yore, where you are interacting with a real human even though they’re definitely not the human you’re imagining in your head, to an AI video chat where you’re seeing exactly what you want but there’s nothing behind it.
If you go back and watch <= 90s movies and tv (PG-13!), it's amazing how pervasive and frank sexuality there is.^
In contrast to current mores that mandate sexy, but never actually talking about sex.
The deterioration of more honest discourse in mass media about realistic (read: fumbling, awkward, funny, vulnerable, spiritual) physical sexuality has left young folks ill prepared to enjoy that side of life.
^ Exhibit A: Hercules the Legendary Journeys (1994, produced by Sam Raimi!) S01E02, which would make most kids today cringe, despite just being scantily-clad depictions of consensual sexual desire and bawdy banter https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgz7burclcI
Do you have a source for that angrily defended "fully rational reinterpretation"?
I suspect the word for what's going on is rationalization not "fully rational reinterpretation" (e.g. "This is a thing we're doing, therefore it's good because we do it. Let's reevaluate everything else to achieve that result.").
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Anyway, a lot of people who have never used the site before think it's mostly what you said. It's not. The parasocial stuff is tiny unless you're doing specific kinks for people.
What I tell most people not familiar with the industry is that it's usually more like seeing someone in real life (NOT a porn star, celeb, etc, amateurs only) that you've got a crush on naked for only $10/mo. It has the amateur thing a lot of people love. Another reddit comment is always "Why pay when porn is free?" Have you never had a crush on someone? And amateur porn is probably the biggest "kink" I feel weird even calling it a kink, I'm practically on the "who doesnt like amateur porn??" end.
That's 90% of the customers. Lots of people who think a youtuber or instagram or whatever not professionally showing themselves off is just hot and want to see them naked.
I've never spoken to a single customer. I'm a straight man and most of mine are men and I have no interest or desperation for money to do para/kink stuff.
I really don't get why so many people think onlyfans is about messaging talent back and forth. It's kind of annoying to constantly read because it always comes from non-OF users who have this weird morality/ethics problem with sex work. It makes no sense if you know anything about porn. Most people jack off in silence and close their laptop and there aren't thousands of onlyfans models with media managers. Most are 18-25yo women who work corporate jobs or bartenders and have their own life to live. They treat it like youtube, upload content a few times a week and never look at messages.
Don't kink shame, stop with the "I don't know why anyone uses this instead of that, you're a loser if you pay for porn" thing. You like what you like, other people like what they like.
Vices like gambling, obscenity, prostitution, drugs, etc are banned or heavily controlled societies over because they have significant negative cultural effects. “Why do YOU care what other people do in their private lives?” was always a stupid justification: if everyone in your community is addicted to vices, that DOES affect me.
Looking at western culture (the only one I feel confident speaking about), we are still bound by puritanical values that were imposed as control mechanisms but managed to sneak their way into a set of cultural norms as a moral code despite their actual value to us not being evaluated and actively selected.
Do they? Citation needed. So far it seems that marijuana consumption leads to far less violence than alcohol, and proliferation of porn leads to much lower rates of sexual violence.
> if everyone in your community is addicted to vices, that DOES affect me
Then choose and manage your own community, but don't push this view on the whole country. Dozens of millions of people (I don't know what country do you live in, so not sure about the population) are not a "community" that you can put under the same norms. If you think that porn is bad, it's your right to do so, and to find likeminded people to build a community that shares these values. But why would you want to force it on other people?
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The free stuff isn't always as good, especially if you want something of a specific niche (fursuits, cosplay, etc). A lot of creators only upload cut-down vidros or "trailers" to free sites with a link to their OF.
At least in my case, I simply see it like the Patreon model. I like supporting some of my favorite artists, especially with something like an ongoing comic series I'll get previews of and vote on polls to influence. Onlyfans is the same if I particularly like some creator. It's great that we can directly support content creators of all kinds now.
I think you're making assumptions about people's motivations that aren't consistent with evidence.
Pornhub and similar sites are full of content that is a dime a dozen and available for free and does not suggest any kind of "parasocial" relationship with the viewer. It's just two or more people fucking. And it's the same as it was ten years ago. And yet... More of that content keeps being made. Porn production companies exist. Pornstars making money for fucking on camera exist. Clearly there are people willing to pay for new porn that will just end up on free-to-view sites anyway.
Your mental model of "it's all about the parasocial relationship" doesn't explain these facts. Thus your mental model can't be the whole truth. I suspect it's at most a fairly small part of the truth.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28887142
The entire system is geared around feeling unheard, unseen and paying to be heard or seen.
20k people shouting into a a void. Paying to get a badge signaling you subscribed. Paying to highlight messages hoping they are read. Hanging on for that hope this popular person gives you 10 seconds of attention.
That's the reality of the depressing industry. And that's how the streamers and steaming providers like it. Ever wonder why the stream chat experience has never been improved? ;)
Oh, and the toxic communities it breeds.
Naked people aren't fungible.
As a person who tried to start a startup but had been hacked and assaulted by the organizations who seem to maintain their monopoly by whatever methods they can use it’s more like a mob of pimps than a single pimp.
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Edit: Maybe there is a correlation between Gamers and Porn.
I think there is a darker side there: many of those subscribers are minors, who discover this kind of content for the first time. That's why OF models stream on Twitch to expand their audience, there are plenty of kids who came there for Minecraft, but will end up subscribing to OF with mom's credit card.
I mean look at the extremely popular K-pop bands, fans get insanely invested into these groups, following them, bringing glowsticks to show support, etc. Or the entire Japanese idol movement for that matter.
Or think about how people stand in line for hours just to get the signature of somebody at a convention.
I think this is just the way a lot of people are wired. I don't know if it's bad or a good thing, it's just something I've noticed.
I do remember a study that people often think label their more popular friends as their "best" friends, but if you go ask THOSE friends, they label THEIR even more popular friends as their "BEST" friends. It's often asymmetrical.
Though tbh going too far down these rabbitholes usually isn't healthy/productive imo.
I still think there are multiple differences.
One is how OnlyFans has successfully turned everyday people into this source of para-social fixation for a multitude of small communities and somehow massified the issue.
The other and the main one for me is that in both the star system or the K-pop industry the system is a mean to an end - selling movie tickets or albums - while OnlyFans genuinely sells the illusion of closeness.
Almost everyone I know thinks that things like OnlyFans are embarrassing at best, and disgusting at worst. Sure, most of us look at porn, but admitting that you've paid for it and _especially_ admitting that you have a "favourite camgirl" or whatever would be properly cringe.
sounds like you meant "professional courtesy"
But while there are successful people on only fans with either more or less clothes on, the vast majority of creators probably sell their dignity for a few dollars.
Agreed that there is something fishy about these new pimps. I guess there are still the conventional pimps too, but they now call themselves manager.
I don't see it as any less dignified than any other work. You sell your labor to someone who pays you less than the value it produces.
Now, if you want to argue that median creators get payed only a tiny fraction of their time, and like Twitch/YouTube it's a losing game for most, then we're on the same page.
A plausible scenario might be an FBI agent paying a confidential informant without creating an unexplained income stream. The FBI and friends disclosed spending around $0.5B on informants. The truth could be more. We don’t know what other agencies around the world spend. I imagine they aren’t putting cash in brown bags under park benches.
The reality is that OnlyFans wasn't the first to try this model. You have to give them credit for successfully building the business, especially with several close calls between them and government regulations.
A similar app creator talks about her experience and why it failed.
It seems she and Justin Mares are running some kind of micro-funding for passionate <25yos. $2k to help young people develop themselves; super cool.
https://www.inflectiongrants.com/
The problem is the payment processor. How the heck do you accept adult-content related payments? That is the hardest problem to solve when it comes to these things in my book.
It's beyond knowing the business model, I guess the founder were at the right place and right time and knew the right people to make this venture succeed.
Also, the marketing, how the heck did these guy blow up so fast. The funds for marketing and all, it's not cheap!
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/24/22639356/onlyfans-ceo-tim...
Recently they've tried to launch OFTV to try and build up more regular (non-spicy) paid content, but it's a tiny fraction of their revenue I would imagine.
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Otherwise, paid porn was already on the downswing due to the rise of free tube sites. Onlyfans somehow got men paying for porn again.
When you can combine that experience with AI generated content, you will create something that I don't think anyone fully understands the ramifications of yet.
The strip clubs were closed, the strippers and the patrons moved to the online strip club.
This is a baffling section where the author goes out of their way to bash browsers vs apps. Maybe there are a lot of cons to apps that browsers don't have. Basically all of the sleights against browsers in this section are not true. When I buy something from amazon, from my browser, I definitely do not need to manually enter my credit card in every time.
For me, iPhone feels like surfing the web with a 46kbauds modem. Single page at a time. Want to load two? IT RELOADS.
Almost all my apps do this to me about once a month.
[Obviously I don't let Android update my apps automatically in the background. That way lies madness.]
Ok, looks like a total UI refresh.
Tried to schedule a bill payment (which previous version could do, uhh, for 10y+) and threw a dialog saying “coming soon”.
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Cost can be a downside, of course.
For vendors the obvious downside is the Apple/Google tax, and is something even we need to be wary of at the company I work for.
But it's not the only downside.
I work for a company that offers a service via the web but, recently, we wanted to prototype some functionality that would exclusively be used from mobile and tablet. It uses the camera, does some nifty stuff with AI (and, to be clear, no, it's not a porn app!), etc., and I thought well, why not prototype it with and app? And, furthermore, why not prototype it as a native app with Swift? This should be the lowest friction route to ddeveloping and deploying an app to iOS, has full access to the platform's extensive built-in capabilities, and therefore it would offer the best user experience, etc.
And I've always been happy to sacrifice a quantity of developer convenience for the sake of offering a better user experience. At the end of the day if we, as engineers, wanted easy jobs we picked the wrong career: we should be aiming to make the lives of our users easier and more productive, and that's often really challenging.
And I'll tell you what: as far as it goes, if I didn't need the app to interact with anything outside of Apple's platform I might still use Swift. It's a nice language, and whilst XCode feels a bit like it Deloreaned in from 2005, it isn't completely terrible.
But that's not our app. It needs to integrate with a bunch of other services and here is where the pain kicked in. Swift and iOS are absolutely the poor cousins when it comes to library and API support. For so many things I wanted to do libraries were incomplete, and documentation was... well, it ranged from non-existent to wrong in critical aspects.
And because Swift is niche (relatively speaking) it's very evident that it doesn't have the kind of mature ecosystem, thought leadership or best practices around it that the likes of C++, Java, C#, Python, and others do. I might be speaking out of turn here but I also get the vibe that it doesn't attract the kind of best of breed practitioners that other more niche development platforms have, which yields better library and API support for them even though they don't necessarily have huge developer bases: think Go, Rust, Flutter, etc.
I don't want to denigrate Swift because, as a language in isolation, I liked it (even though it's Objective C underpinnings are never far from showing themselves). But as a development experience, it was a complete nightmare. Outside of functionality that depended only on the device itself I struggled to get anything working well.
You could put this down to, well, you're new to the platform, what do you expect? But I was able to otherwise be immediately productive in Python 18 months ago when I started working with it, and didn't run into these kinds of frustrations.
In the end I literally got to the point of, screw this, let's just use web, or maybe a hybrid app with the thinnest of thin native wrappers, or maybe flutter. But not native, no way.
[0] I say little anxiety rather than no anxiety because I'm not generally a fan of free apps the serve ads, where you don't really know what's on the other end, or how they might be tracking you, and often the UX is such that it's made a bit easier than one might ideally like to accidentally click an ad.
Eh, with WebGL and WebRTC maybe. The problem is input
This is the wildest part. One company that is proving all the "why does <company> need 10000 engineers?" takes true.
Generally speaking, <company> needs <number> engineers because it's rational to keep hiring while each incremental engineer generates more value than they cost in salary and overhead, even if some of those engineers are at less than 50% utilisation and have to generate pointless make-work for themselves to get past performance review.
AWS/GCP/Azure manage physical data centers across the globe, and includes hundreds of services/offerings on each platform.
Additionally, critical industries (hospitals, banks, airlines) often rely on these companies to be available/resilient at all times. Thus the need for increased global workforce. OF on the other hand, nobody is going to die if they can’t access the feet pics they bought for a few minutes or days.
You are not comparing the same companies.
At least compare it to companies with similar businesses. I would argue twitch seems closer. I think they had over 1000 employees. You would have a better point with that comparison if you would want to make that argument.
For instance moderation and community management alone must be a huge pool of people. While the content and comments can be adult, they'll need to deal with all the payment related back and forth, including chargebacks, legal inquiries etc. Same for doxxing, underage filtering, spam and so on.
I assume most if not all of it is a different company which isn't counted in the 42 employees.
Of course engineering can be treated the same, with sub-contracting companies dealing with the actual running of the service or part of the developement.
If Company A sells $100M of televisions which they imported for $95M they've made $5M in profit.
If Company B sells $100M of search ads which they served for $1M they've made $99M in profit.
From a revenue perspective they're equal - but $1M invested in Company A produces a 5% return on investment, while the same $1M invested in Company B has a 9900% ROI.
funnily enough out of the 42 employees still there, i assume less than a fourth are actually engineers.
OnlyFans has only about 42 employees. They didn't hire a bloated staff. That's impressive considering the sheer volume of content that passes through their servers.
It looks like OnlyFans has figured out how to do the porno business in a more or less legit way. So what's the problem?
were you replying to someone else making a comment attacking onlyfans?
IMO the lede is a bit buried within the article. The idea that a non-app could survive this well within the strangling iOS system should come as a revelation to the greater iOS community.