For years, I was profoundly puzzled by people that are willing to give hundreds -- if not thousands -- of dollars to (mostly women) they'll never meet for what's basically freely available offline. I saw a very interesting mini-documentary on YouTube[0] not too long ago that kind of opened my eyes. The idea here is that places like Onlyfans, and to a lesser extent Twitch, monetize loneliness via parasocial relationships[1]. This is fundamentally different than being a fan of, say, an actress like Emma Stone, or an athlete like LeBron James.
Viewers (the subject) actually believe they have a relationship with the object (be they a pro gamer or scantily-clad model). To most well-adjusted folks with a healthy social circle, this seems kind of nuts, but parasocial relationships have a long and sordid history -- starting with the invention of the "fireside chat" on radio. Loneliness is a powerful motivator and the psychology here is profoundly interesting. At the end of the day, I'd say places like Onlyfans end up being net negatives for both the models as well as the fans. It's a bit sick that the internet -- the very thing which was supposed to bring people together -- ends up cannibalizing its own.
The economics of entertainment (and that is what an only-fans account is: entertainment) don't follow this cold calculation of value.
A single ticket to an NBA playoff game ranges from about $150 to over $5,000 (back when you could go).
You can see the game for effectively free at home, with better commentary, exactly the snacks you want and all of that.
A night at the symphony or opera starts--starts--at $50 a ticket, and can go to $1500 easily. After the show is over, it's over, and all you have is a memory.
Good seats at a popular rock concert are easily $250. You can get the mp3 for next to nothing, and it will be a better recording too.
Even just a movie these days starts at almost $20.
And yet people still fork out the money. It isn't just the show itself that they are paying for, it is the entire experience. The interaction, being part of the crowd, a crowd. Many things.
The value captured by an entertainment here isn't just the bits of the picture.
And I say this as someone who would never, ever pay for the content I know of on only fans. But I have sunk a lot of money into the other things on the above list.
> and that is what an only-fans account is: entertainment
While trivially true, this is extremely reductive. People don't attend basketball games, operas, or go eat at Michelin star restaurants because they're lonely. People donate thousands to streamers and models because they are.
> People donate thousands to streamers and models because they are [lonely].
Or because they like the entertainment? Some guy on twitch donated over $20k, over half of it for college students to do push-ups in exchange for free food (about the other half was tips to the workers of the streaming food truck [0]).
A happily married couple both watch a food streamer [1], they donated hundreds of dollar, probably over 1k.
Hell, I donated around $300 between the two mentioned streams, I’m happily married as well.
When people donate to FOSS authors, it’s because they want to support their work, but when they donate to streamers it’s because they are lonely?
Now certainly. There are those, and probably a lot more on streams featuring scantily clad women. But reducing it to that level is just wrong.
Underlying this discussion seems to be the free market/free will idea that refuses to judge decisions in a free market, because how could it? If someone spends money, they must get this objective, intangible benefit from it and who are we to judge. "You are not my mom".
Yet there is an objective difference in everything we do. You've listed a few nuances yourself; somethings are better than others. The underlying psychological circumstances are also true: There is a better, healthier way to live, feel and interact and there are many pathological, harmful ways too.
I would approach it like this and ask: "Would you rather play a game with a group of awesome friends (as hard as it may seem to find such a group, and even if that requires some effort and personality development to make such friends), or watch that streamer?"
"Would you rather have a real relationship with another person (as discouraged by the idea you might be right now) than hang out in that chatroom and pay money to a stranger?"
This discussion just cares about the extremes. Maybe there are lonely people that get milked on behalf on parasocial relationships. Maybe there are rich people that like streaming and honor it with money. There are probably a lot people with unknown financial and social status that just lurk on and off (like me). Unless we conduct research that indicates that this is massively negative to the society we should not speculate and try to make up stigmas.
But who is saying it has to be either or? When I have a roleplaying session (roll20 tabletop), I don’t watch streams. Some people like to watch TV by themselves sometimes. It’s simply not that different from any other type of entertainment.
Sure. We do all sorts of things. My point is there is an objective quality to each of it, which could (theoretically, for the point of it) be established by interviewing the individual and having them rank various forms of entertainment, while reflecting on the effect it has on their psyche.
I know very well that for me, jogging, or unwinding with a game is all right but not as good as sailing or mountaineering with a group of cool people or dancing with a skilled partner. Most things even have their place. But there is a real difference that can't be denied. We could even dissect the experience and find the rewarding or unrewarding elements: bonding with a group of people in nature and getting a varied excercise while doing it could rank very high (for many individuals).
If we agree on that, we can go on and see if some activities are bad for many/most people, and label them as such. A low-bandwith interaction with fake-emotion, a simple stimulation in a one-way relationship could then be categorized as Bad.
That's a long way to state the obvious but the sacred idea of the free will made it necessary for me to make this point :)
There is an objective difference, but there is in my opinion not an "objective" better way to live. (There are certainly healthier ways, in the sense that it optimizes the ages at which you die, which is...good ?).
It seems you value a certain psychological state, so, good for you, but this psychological state is not necessarily sought by everyone, and claiming it's better seems a bit rude.
If I'm to play the devil's advocate, I could you're seeking social ephemeral experiences to keep you distracted because you're not able to achieve the better state of being satisfied on your own through the objectively better activity of...meditation ?
I think you can see how obnoxious this is to see your own activities denigrated. And really, I don't think meditating is better than playing a game or than watching a streamer. All of these activities can lead to pathological behaviours (with varied rates I suppose ?), and when they do not they all sound great and all have a purpose.
So, I wouldn't engage in classifying activities as good or bad, but I'd rather have psychological support available to all practicioners.
I appreciate your reply but it blows my mind that the idea of better and worse is routinely rejected. I have to consider that.
This line of thought is however used elsewhere by scammers ("the person bought it at that price so they must like it"), free market absolutists ("the market - the sum of supposedly infallible decisions - made me rich and made you poor") and leads to people playing World of Warcraft 24/7 ("it is my choice, how can you argue that"). Anecdotally I have received good advice from people and when I followed it, it changed things to the better.
I don't deny that there are unhealthy habits (playing WoW 24/7 is most definitely unhealthy for the mind and body). My thought is that at the same time :
- No hobby is immune to leading to addictive patterns, (some are definitely more prone than others).
- No hobby always lead to addictive patterns
So in my opinion, if you don't engage unhealthily in your hobby, there's really none that is better than an other. So, WoW, climbing, dancing, reading, commenting on HN, whatever is good for you, I don't think one is inherently better.
> I appreciate your reply but it blows my mind that the idea of better and worse is routinely rejected. I have to consider that.
> free market absolutists ("the market - the sum of supposedly infallible decisions - made me rich and made you poor")
Whoa, hey... The market is supposed to be the infallible sum of individual decisions, not the other way around. :-D
Of course, this still ignores truisms like "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent", or the existing exploitation of reliably-bad decision makers such as "whales" in Las Vegas casinos or Zynga games, marketing's "Harbingers of Failure" segment, etc.
Sometimes I would like to play games with my friends, and sometimes I would MUCH prefer just lurking on a stream brain dead. It only harms the discussion to frame it one-dimensionally
> People donate thousands to streamers and models because they are [lonely].
Speaking of being reductive...
Consider the possibility that people also do it because they enjoy the interaction they get out of it, however shallow and/or fleeting.
The same way some people pay top dollar for a "meet and greet" with rock stars or athletes before a show or game, where you get to shake hands, take selfies and trade platitudes with famous people and then they never see you or think of you again.
People donate to streams to hear the streamer thank them or call them out by name or interact with them, in some manner, for some amount of time.
I'm not saying loneliness is not a factor, but it's definitely not the only factor. Like everything else to do with human interactions, it's complicated.
>People donate to streams to hear the streamer thank them or call them out by name or interact with them, in some manner, for some amount of time.
Let's get one more accusation of reductiveness in here.
You are still viewing it through a lens of parasocial behavior. The token thanks isn't the only motivating factor. People don't donate to NPR just to get tote bags. They donate because they recognize the content has both value and costs. Those donations are part of recognizing that value and supporting future content creation. The same applies to streaming. Some donations are a means of thanking the streamer and providing them with both a means and a motivation to continue making content.
The interactive nature of the content on a site like Twitch doesn't necessarily make it any different than non-interactive content you might find on a site like Patreon.
> People don't donate to NPR just to get tote bags. [...] The interactive nature of the content on a site like Twitch doesn't necessarily make it any different than non-interactive content you might find on a site like Patreon.
Comparing someone like Pokimane or Amouranth to NPR is laughably disingenuous. There are amazing content creators out there (ranging from math, to dance, to music, to films, to politics) that don't exploit parasocial relationships with their audience. Onlyfans is, arguably, positioned to specifically exploit parasocial relationships.
I'm not comparing their content. I am comparing their business models. I don't see many differences between the business model of NPR and many Twitch streamers. They give their content away for free knowing most people will never pay for it, they ask for donations knowing only a small percentage would be willing to donate, and they give donators a few token gifts as a thank you.
You admit yourself there are "amazing content creators out there... that don't exploit parasocial relationships" so why are you judging everyone by the standards of the worst examples you can find? That is why you were also accused of being reductive.
> You admit yourself there are "amazing content creators out there... that don't exploit parasocial relationships" so why are you judging everyone by the standards of the worst examples you can find? That is why you were also accused of being reductive.
Because the article is about Onlyfans and Bella Thorne: a platform (and a creator) that leverages parasocial interaction. It's not like models make Onlyfans accounts to fund their science and math YouTube channels.
The conversation grew beyond talking specifically about Bella Thorne or Onlyfans in part becomes of comments like yours from a few posts back:
>People donate thousands to streamers and models because they are [lonely].
So once again you are making generalizations about this business model and the people who participate in it because of the worst examples you can find. Maybe that means Onlyfans and other similar services need more moderation, but it doesn't mean this business model is unethical or inherently preys on the lonely.
Also AFAIA the only real difference between Onlyfans and Patreon is that one allows adult content. I am having a hard time understanding why someone would be against one and not the other unless the reason was due to some ingrained prudishness. Is there any difference between the two that I am missing?
> Also AFAIA the only real difference between Onlyfans and Patreon is that one allows adult content. I am having a hard time understanding why someone would be against one and not the other unless the reason was due to some ingrained prudishness. Is there any difference between the two that I am missing?
Yeah, I guess I should've been more clear.
I don't think that the only difference between the two is that Onlyfans merely "allows adult content." Onlyfans is specifically aimed towards monetizing parasocial behavior (why you buy private messaging rights[1], etc.). Patreon is a way meant to support creators. I sub on Patreon to several creators, but there was no parasocial element: I didn't pretend to be someone's friend and no one sold me on that.
>Importantly, as with your existing social platforms, make sure you engage and interact with your fans, as it’s a two way street. Using this to your advantage enables you to create a more personalised experience and strengthen the bond between you and your fans. OnlyFans private messaging facility puts your fans in direct contact with you, and you can ask what they would like to see. This way you can tailor your plan to give fans more of what they want. Asking fans what they most want will help you understand their preferences and you can build the most popular requests into your plan.
I don't think anything listed here is advice that is specific to Onlyfans. Engagement is generally good for all creators.
I have also supported numerous creators on Patreon, mostly podcasters. Not every creator on Patreon follows this advice. There are certainly some that setup a clear one way transactional relationship in which you donate money and they give you content. However I have subscribed to creators that prioritize interacting with their patrons. That has included live interactive patron-only streams, Q&As, as well as fielding requests for specific content. Patreon also does have private messaging, but I have never used that functionality before so I don't know all the details.
I don't get the impression that all engagement is meant to fool me into thinking that the creator is my friend. I don't think that necessarily would change if the content creators were taking off their clothes versus talking into a microphone. It is really all up to how the creator wants to handle their business. Some like Bella Thorne might do so unethically. That doesn't mean every creator will take that approach.
Let's not mince words: the fact that the platform itself supports features like "private messaging" -- when most creators are attractive women in their 20s and most subscribers are men in their 30s and 40s -- is kind of a red flag. The staunch libertarian in me says "who cares, let people do whatever" but I do think it's a net negative overall (not to mention quite sad).
> Also AFAIA the only real difference between Onlyfans and Patreon is that one allows adult content.
I'm afraid you're being disingenuous. Up to this point of the discussion, the whole argument was about how platforms such as OnlyFans and to a lesser extent Twitch monetize loneliness via parasocial relationships. Platforms such as Patreon were not included because they don't focus on monetizing parasocial relationships due to the non-interactive relationship of their content. Your moralist red herring intentionally ignores the entire argument and is uncalled for as a blatant attempt to poison the well.
I just want to say that this is a really fascinating discussion and I want to thank you both for this. You both have really opened my eyes to both sides of this argument.
As you've admitted yourself, this isn't the kind of thing you're into and because of that, I think you're running the risk of demonizing an industry simply because you cannot understand nor relate to it.
Titillation has always been profitable (eg why product advertisements feature attractive models) and it's not always about loneliness (though I'm not going to dispute that it sometimes is). Sometimes it's just about fun or primal desire. I know couples who have been to strip clubs and paid for dances -- happy couples who just enjoy the adult nature of it after a few beers. It's also entirely possible to lust after something without being lonely. Just as it is possible that some people have a comfortable income and feel like they want to pay for the content they consume -- whether that's literature, music, film and TV, or nude selfies. You might intellectualise about which form requires greater creative input but ultimately there's still someone putting themselves out there and trying to pay their bills.
I tend to look at this stuff like fast food. Some people like it, some people hate it. As long as you consume it in moderation -- which most people do -- then it has a right to coexist with fine dining restaurants.
I mean, with onlyfans you are paying for content like anything else, right? Or do you just pay for messaging access? I was under the impression that you were paying for photos and videos and such.
> The same way some people pay top dollar for a "meet and greet" with rock stars or athletes before a show or game, where you get to shake hands, take selfies and trade platitudes with famous people and then they never see you or think of you again.
Famous people aren't exempt from fostering parasocial relationships (see Taylor Swift's iPhone app), and Eminem famously wrote/performed "Stan" about a hypothetical overzealous fan that was in a parasocial relationship with him.
I don't think I'm being reductive when I say that I think most Onlyfans subscribers -- especially those that give significant percentages of their income to models for a modicum of attention -- are "stans."
I donate to musicians and artists on Patreon and programmers on Github and Ko-fi because I like what they're doing and I want them to keep doing it and getting better. Especially to those just starting in their careers. It's validation that I felt I never had and that I wished for. I hope that I'm paying it forward. It feels more tangible than donating to a giant, faceless charity.
And it feels good. I might be getting music or ML models or whatever out of it, but at the core, it feels like I've made a positive contribution. It's personal, and I can imagine its direct impact in the recipient's life.
In the case of art and music, there's also the touch of living vicariously through other creatives that are building a different skill set than I chose. I picked programming, and though it's too late to go back with all that I've got going on in my life, it's fun to imagine what could have been if I'd practiced sketching every day.
I don't know about Twitch and OnlyFans users, but I can totally imagine donating for motivations other than loneliness. Maybe it's validation. Maybe showing off. Or maybe they're simply saying "I like what you do, please keep it up." And maybe the donors are getting a fun in-game commentary or something else as an added bonus.
Don't decry it. I think these evolutions in patronage are interesting and exciting.
I don't know, I bet plenty of people are feeling lonely when they go out for some entertainment and that entertainment makes them feel less lonely. I don't see why that's such a bad thing.
I recently supported the new Patreon page created by a podcast host who I have been listening to for over 10 years. He sent all his supporters a short personalized video, and watching that video gave me the feeling of an authentic personal connection. Of course there's no deception going on here, I do believe that he genuinely appreciates my (very small financial) support, but there's no expectation that we're now "actually friends" in the traditional sense (he has hundreds of supporters). But still, it's a nice feeling of personal connection, and it doesn't feel like an indictment of major social problems plaguing society (other than perhaps the obvious lockdown-associated reduction in human contact).
Of course, in my example there's nothing remotely flirtatious or sexual going on, which as I understand it is common on OnlyFans. Maybe that detail makes it completely unlike my example, but it really doesn't feel that different to me.
>People don't attend basketball games, operas, or go eat at Michelin star restaurants because they're lonely.
I think it's reductive to consider that people are only on OnlyFans because they're lonely. People frequented strip clubs forever but I don't think everyone at a Vegas strip club is there because they are lonely.
Maybe not everyone, but the “going to a strip club out of loneliness” thing is an age-old meme, whereas I’m unaware of any such memes about going to an NBA game out of loneliness.
> People frequented strip clubs forever but I don't think everyone at a Vegas strip club is there because they are lonely.
Strip clubs are notorious for monetizing parasocial behavior, being places where men literally throw money to buy some attention and are scolded if they ever think of approaching the same person in other contexts that don't involve monetization of that interaction.
People wear Golden State Warriors gear and party at Oracle after the game because they want to be a part of the crowd. That is exactly a search for connection. The Warriors don't care about you (at least not more than anyone else).
Some people might not be lonely. They might just be horny, and have a fetish to see specific individuals, whose erotic content might not be available elsewhere.
Your model when thinking about this is to assume everyone thinks nude people are fungible, but people used to buy specific gossip magazines at the grocery store to see SPECIFIC celebrities caught in the nude. So this is not something new.
> People don't attend basketball games, operas, or go eat at Michelin star restaurants because they're lonely.
If you don't think a big part of the appeal of sports fandom is artificial group connection of much the same type as the kinds of artificial individual connection some people seek through the entertainment you are denigrating, I think you are quite mistaken.
But, again just as for sports, just being entertained is a big part of this, too.
I did watched tv and movies because I was lonely, because those contained people speaking and interacting.
I never used OnlyFans, but from my point of view, if those using it are mostly lonely guys, then it does not sound that bad. Had they had girlfriends who would objected, I can see relationship issue there.
But other then that, lonely guy using strip porn made by someone who did porn voluntary does not strikes me as massive problem.
>Good seats at a popular rock concert are easily $250. You can get the mp3 for next to nothing, and it will be a better recording too.
Most musicians sound like shittier versions of themselves live. Some of them have great sound engineering teams and enough vocal talent (Most often its the singer that struggles live) to actually sound as good as they do in a studio. When you have the perfect situation, the overall effect sounds better to me. Only been to a couple Tool concerts. Neither were 250 but tickets can get pretty expensive after something sells out. Another part of it is the experience but for me its mostly the way it sounds when they get it right.
> Most musicians sound like shittier versions of themselves live
Probably genre dependent but I would have to disagree. Live recordings are more raw and less produced - with a band that has their shit together live it's magical because there's an authenticity to the sound and level of immersion that is impossible to get from a recording at home.
If you take another look at the last half of my comment its essentially what you said, when they have their shit together its better live. I don't think most musicians fall into that category. At least most rock/metal/bluegrass performers. Honestly its usually the lead singer that struggles with live performances. Anything completely instrumental like Jazz/Classical has a better chance of being a great performance as long as the sound guys did a good job.
All your examples consist of spending next to nothing for a digital experience compared to a lot of money for a physical experience. But onlyfans is a digital experience.
So the correct analogy would be looking at porn/onlyfans and going to a brothel
> It isn't just the show itself that they are paying for, it is the entire experience. The interaction, being part of the crowd, a crowd. Many things.
Yes, except with social relationships, exactly the opposite things are of value. You want to be as exclusive as possible with the other person, so that you both have as much of other's attention as possible. Otherwise, what's the point?
The value of being one a part of a crowd at a sporting event versus being part of a crowd on a platform like onlyfans, where the entertainment is social interaction are completely different and the analogy doesn't really hold (for well adjusted people, of course)
> Yes, except with social relationships, exactly the opposite things are of value. You want to be as exclusive as possible with the other person, so that you both have as much of other's attention as possible. Otherwise, what's the point?
Wait what?
That's definitely not true for non romantic relationships. Even in the context of a traditional monogomous romantic relationships that sounds incredibly unhealthy.
Anyways i disagree generally. People don't spend $$$ on backstage concert tickets because they want to blend into the crowd. I have no idea what goes on at onlyfans, but i doubt people use it as a literal replacement for in person interaction in the same way i doubt strip clubs, brothel's, etc are used by their patrons solely to replace "normal" socisl interaction.
>That's definitely not true for non romantic relationships.
It is. If you go into a chatroom with 10 active people its easier to form bonds with any particular person in the group than if you have 400 people. A relationship on HN or Facebook is extremely shallow because it is not exclusive. If you were to restrict yourself to bookmarking to 1-5 users and only responding to their comments then you would easily form a relationship with those people. Lots of people put their email address in their profiles so they can have exclusive communication between two parties.
Maybe the social media example is too tech focused. A relationship between parent and child is also exclusive but the exclusivity shrinks as the family size grows. There are extreme families that have 10 children and as a result each child spends very little time with their parents. Instead, the older brothers and sisters take care of a lot of parenting. Children form stronger bonds with their siblings than with their parents.
>Even in the context of a traditional monogamous romantic relationships that sounds incredibly unhealthy.
That sounds to me more like your own preference is to be on a polygamous relationship with several people. There is nothing wrong with that but calling other people's relationships "incredibly unhealthy" is quite rude. It's easier to have a deep relationship with one wife than a series of potential girlfriends who you meet for one date and then never again. Of course you might find the right one and then never marry but from an exclusivity standpoint it is equivalent to a marriage.
Maybe you are reading too much into "have as much of other's attention as possible". Exclusivity is not about how much time you spend with a person. It's about how much you are restricting yourself to a small selection of people. Exclusivity increases the maximum possible time that can be spent on a relationship but it doesn't mean that you actually spend every waking hour with your partner or friend.
Its fine to have exclusive relationships. Its not fine to try to socially isolate your partner so that they have no social contact outside the relationship. I would describe such a relationship as abusive.
I strugle to interpret the grandparent's phrase "You want to be as exclusive as possible with the other person, so that you both have as much of other's attention as possible" in a way that doesn't support socially isolating your partner, which i would consider unhealthy as an ideal, and abusive in practise. All relationships take time and effort, whether that's friends or otherwise. If 100% of your attention (which is the max possible) is focused on your partner, it implies that 0% of your energy is focused on any other friendships/social contact. That is unhealthy. It should not be held as an ideal.
But to be very clear, you can still be in a healthy exclusive romantic healthy monogomous relationship, while still having other friends & acquaintances. Having other platonic friends is not the same as being polygamous/polyamorous/etc.
I'm not saying that the reasons people go to NBA games and the reasons they go to onlyfans are the same, just that the money comes from the same budget--discretionary income for wants.
all of your examples are places you go to. things are happening in front of you. Onlyfans? not so much. You pay for digital entertainment that is the same as any free digital entertainment. It's sad for both parties to be honest.
A better analogy than opera would be the trade in things like illegal drugs, opiate painkillers, or tobacco, etc. Which depend intrinsically on exploiting particular human frailties and vulnerabilities, and which have harmful effects.
>parasocial relationships have a long and sordid history -- starting with the invention of the "fireside chat" on radio.
They don't call it the oldest profession as a joke. Social interaction and validation is the single most valuable thing to human beings, and it always has been. The basic business model of OnlyFans is absolutely no different than what has occured since the beginning of human civilization.
Yeah I rarely watch Twitch but basically do so for two reasons.
The first is to check out games I'm interested in. The streamer is mostly incidental unless they're actually getting in the way of seeing the game. YouTube exists for this too, but I find the spaces in between the highlights that you see in streams to be more interesting than the structured reviews.
The second is to watch them play a game I've already played, usually in the hopes they enjoy it too. It's a form of validation of my own experiences, it's just nice to see someone happy at the same things I guess, and also a way to relive a story I might have mostly forgotten but through a fresh perspective.
> Yeah I rarely watch Twitch but basically do so for two reasons.
I think you may even be in the minority. I would expect most fans of twitch streamers to be an actual fan, not there to merely enjoy the game (even tho the game is actually enjoyable to them as well).
On youtube, it is more likely the opposite - "fans" on youtube enjoy the content, more than the youtuber. This is typically why once a youtuber becomes well-known for one type of content, that they cannot switch away (see the countless minecraft content creators that are somewhat burnt out by minecraft, but continues to make it since it is the majority of their views). Content creators who _are_ personalities and can branch out, have already done so to twitch.
I think it’s hard to outline why people watch twitch. I follow quite a few blood bowl streamers, and use twitch for little else.
I use it like I use sports. Though at first I did learn things, but now it’s solely for watching high end playoff/championship games, sometimes with friends.
I haven’t really donated much outside the thing you get by having an amazon prime subscription. Which is honestly rather silly considering how much money I pay for my NFL subscription.
> It's a form of validation of my own experiences,
I think this is an important one. Growing up as kids, we'd often sit next to siblings (or parents) to watch them play games, turning them into a shared experience.
I prefer watching shit on TV with my girlfriend over watching it alone as well; like you said, having someone else react similarly validates your experience.
It's really not to different from a lot of religious behavior either. If people can feel deeply attached after reading a book or hearing a story It really shouldn't be surprising that that others can feel the same via stream or other digital mediums. One can also think of these purchased rewards/interactions as the equivalent of relic collection/worship.
It is very interesting, especially the sociological demographic data showing what is happening in response to the decline of church attendance.
In a nut-shell, communities that stop going to ‘church’ don’t produce enough offspring to be long term (centuries) stable, but those that do are long term stable.
Japan has a related IRL version[1]. In this case it's mostly lonely women, strangely enough, who go to 'host' clubs where young men feign interest in them, and will give them more time if the jane pays more. At first blush it seems ridiculous, but there you have it. As you point out, these subjects on certain level believe they have a kind of romantic relationship with these young men.
Obviously Japan is also known for hostess clubs where men pay for attention as well as regular old Soapland stuff.
IIRC on HN itself there was an article about a service where you could just hire someone to (pretend to be) your friend / significant other, to pretend to your families you're not some lonely shut-in and you're doing all right. The requests were quite varied.
It's dystopian as fuck but it fulfills a need, apparently.
The Netflix miniseries Maniac has something similar, a company called Friend Proxy where you can hire someone to act like a friend of yours. It's a really interesting take on the cyberpunk genre, it's worth watching.
I know of a friend who spends a lot of money on this platform. I was baffled by the amounts he ends up spending, ~5% of his monthly income. He doesn't have that high a disposable income, so it made no sense to me, considering I can't even imagine me spending a single dollar on such stuff.
When I asked him about it, he said "the messages are personalised and it doesn't feel artificial. They kind of lead you on to pay more as the interaction goes on".
I would be really surprised if it is not bots interacting at this point. The kind of messages he was talking about being "personalised", felt very generic, at least the initial ones and they could reuse the same content over and over again with others.
It gets me to wondering: how hard would it be to create computer generated OnlyFans models (actors? performers?) and set up some chat bots to interact with fans?
Even if the chat bot would lack verisimilitude, I can imagine outsourcing the messages to developing countries and adding some tools to let them make quick, cash-generating responses more efficiently.
>>>It gets me to wondering: how hard would it be to create computer generated OnlyFans models (actors? performers?) and set up some chat bots to interact with fans?
Arguably, this has been attempted already with Projekt Melody.
While I don't know why Projekt Melody got banned, on the YouTube side, VTubers are already a thing, the largest one I know of is kizuna ai with 2.8M subscribers
> [...] new guidelines for acceptable levels of clothing coverage that everyone on the website is required to follow, including digital characters like Melody.
Given that their experiment was quite successful and already had a few sponsors ... couldn't they just add some clothing to avoid being banned?
It's an open question if Twitch gets anything out of non-pro-gaming streamers.
Ultimately those dollars come at the expense of others, there is limited attention and money, it really isn't something that would just exist elsewhere.
For example people also spend a lot of money on virtual slot machine games, so much so they were usually one out of every 11 apps in Apple's top grossing, back when they reported this list. It couldn't possibly be healthy for the app ecosystem, it sucks the air out of the room for other developers making creative or useful stuff. Sure it makes money, but a lot of things make money, it's stupid to reduce the effect of virtual slot machine games down to, "Well its users wouldn't spend the dollars elsewhere, and the more money to Apple the better, so it helps everyone."
The success of virtual slot machines has hurt video game developers, because financiers expect you to reproduce their mechanics, even though their expectation that it's all about mechanics is wrong. Hence many games with pointless slot machine mechanics.
Nobody needs OnlyFans. OnlyFans harms earnest creators, it ghettoizes earnest female creators especially because your agent, your manager, your friends, your family, your viewers - they will now expect that the surest way to make money is selling your body, and not by having any real talent or skills. OnlyFans and its porn stars have completely co-opted well-meaning people with this talk about sex work, COVID, it sucks to live in Bulgaria and whatever. Bella Thorne is of course a huge hack, it is preposterous she is repeatedly being given a platform by the media where the net result will be, more people will stop trying hard and gamble on being nude online.
They're not the only platform. TikTok is full of talentless hacks too, who simply win a random Internet lottery and are completely and utterly distorting earnest creativity and opportunities for hard working people. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube also reward SEO / ripping off other people's stuff much more than creating something original. This "well it makes money" bullshit has to end.
> It's an open question if Twitch gets anything out of non-pro-gaming streamers.
> Ultimately those dollars come at the expense of others, there is limited attention and money,
What? There are huge untapped markets for live streams of "things" outside pro-gaming. I have zero interest in gaming but watch streams of people doing various projects (mostly on Youtube, but this is just showing there is a market).
> people also spend a lot of money on virtual slot machine games... it sucks the air out of the room for other developers making creative or useful stuff.
This seems an incredibly zero-sum way of looking at it. Maybe there is some cross-over between some zero-effort casual gaming and gambling, but that is a long way from "useful stuff".
> the surest way to make money is selling your body, and not by having any real talent or skills
oh here we go again. Explain to me how OnlyFans models sell their bodies, but countless actresses who play shitty parts in shitty movies, for peanuts, do not, just because they don't show their tits?
Unethical but I won't be surprised if that is exactly what's happening. Once you have the media, you just need a person to chat up and insert that media. For all we know, that can be a dude.
For content as well, you can scrape other platforms and create a new identity.
Wasn't it disclosed through the Ashley Madison hack that they were employing bots (and real people) to keep the clients busy and lure them into buying more "chatting privileges" (number of messages etc.?
So this has already happened to some degree. As AI (aka humans teaching computers) to make for better "hungrier" chatboxes, with the escalation (buy more messages, send client to next tier), sell a "more personalized package" (to use the parent comment of his friend).
This could do a nice Black Mirror episode. Like the one where she lost her husband, her friend registered for the Tier1 service and it went on from that..
In addition to being a total scumbag move, using the face of a real identifiable person would be criminal in many jurisdictions even if the photos/videos were computer generated.
But then it's like, should we protect people from anti-vaccine messages or other misinformation? Is the only way to prevent societal collapse to have a higher authority step in and protect people who cannot resist temptation from themselves?
I don't know who I would trust to enforce that kind of thing.
A lot of times I do end up wishing there was someone who would set me straight every time I attempted to eat unhealthy or not exercise. But it seems like the imperative in modern society is that you're just going to have to learn to resist temptation on your own, or you're done for - good luck. I don't really understand this, because I can say that I want to improve myself all the time and be fully aware of my mild desire to do so, and be willing to have someone put me on the right path, and simply never get around to it all until it's too late.
And then there's climate change, where I have accepted that trying to convince people to change is hopeless on a large scale. Who is going to be trusted to make the decisions "for our own good," without another yellow vests movement springing out in opposition?
> But then it's like, should we protect people from anti-vaccine messages or other misinformation? Is the only way to prevent societal collapse to have a higher authority step in and protect people who cannot resist temptation from themselves?
Society is comprised of people, and some members of society are indeed vulnerable and susceptible to abuse. Society is expected to step up to stop and punish abuse directed at vulnerable members of society, like how the police intervenes in domestic violence cases, and how social services intervenes in at-risk families.
I don't see the point of arguing against protecting the most vulnerable members of society. There is zero to be gained with Spartan approaches to it's weakest and most vulnerable members.
I'm pretty sure they're still personalized, but they're "stock" messages because these people deal with dozens of requests a day. Very lucrative, I'm sure.
They are sort of like streamers with webcams, but they do not expose their real image. Instead they make up a fictional backstory and have an artist create a visual representation of them that gets motion/face tracked. It feels like an offshoot of traditional Japanese idols, with the same merchandising and live events, but with a totally different distribution method.
Personally, as someone that doesn't understand the appeal of real-life idols, I end up watching a lot of the virtual people because even though I understand there is a system behind it, it does fill in the desires that stem from being lonely. Yes, it is not a substitute for human contact, and I am fully cognizant of this every time I watch, but the most interesting parts for me come from the interaction between the different streamers instead of the streamers with the audience anyways. They frequently do collaborations, and eventually there comes a weird sort of mythology that emerges where you and the other streamers gradually understand the most memorable qualities of each (one is perverted, one is the most "idol-like", one is a fluent speaker of English and has knowledge of American meme culture, and so on). Sometimes they also exude a form of the "heel and face" aspects of professional wrestling. Thus when you come back for more you see the same group of characters in new situations, and the backstory you have previously built up in your mind increases your interest in what happens. It feels kind of like a long running soap opera, or indeed professional wrestling, except with much more emphasis on personalized interaction and a lot of people yelping at each other in a foreign language. That's another thing. The fact that most of the members do not speak English and there are no official translations of most of the content gives the experience an odd foreign quality where the streamers will desperately try to translate things or greet people in broken English, which they promptly forget, in order to "summon the foreigner people". That in itself becomes a meme that the group capitalizes on heavily.
I think the fact that you do not see a real person sets your expectations that you are watching someone with a fictional backstory better, and even so you can still enjoy the things they talk about. Unlike actors, they frequently talk about things like going to the convenience store to buy snacks or cook things or discuss that one time that one member paid for the bill for another and then forgot to leave enough for the subway home, in the context of the actual people going incognito and doing things off-stream. Even supposing it was scripted, it does not feel like it at all, more like they were given a general list of topics and free reign to more or less day what they want. It gives it a very human quality that static television or movies or idol concerts do not usually provide, and I think that is the key thing that people (me included) keep coming back for. The virtualness also implies that you do not necessarily have to "sell your body" to make it big as an entertainer, which I think is a relatively recent innovation.
Then there are things that happen like a steamer sneezing triggering a flood of donations, some over $100. The donators are very concious of the image of their kind that gets posted on the Internet. In fact some of the streamers themselves go to great length to satirize the donation culture, the CEO of the talent company that manages them, and "real" idol groups that existed before, also categorizing each character by different dimensions (most to least pure, etc.). It is a very integrated system, and I can easily underand how it can suck people in, having been sucked in myself for a while.
That does not change the fact that a system still exists however. Recently there was a very high profile "graduation" of a member who hadn't even been streaming for two weeks over a doxing scandal, which was really a cover for "firing to save face." It really does remind you that it's just the entertainment business in a different manifestation.
7 out of the 10 steamers with the highest donation amount on YouTube are virtual YouTubers. There is clearly a market being tapped here. Whether or not people should or ought to, if they are "slaves to loneliness," is a different question I don't really want to pursue.
Check this reddit thread out [1]. A very toxic streamer going on complete tirades with his teammates playing Among Us, and all the comments are people playing down the vitriol of the streamer with phrases like "I love him", "He's really funny", etc.
What's equally sad is the special moderation privileges given to large streamers by Twitch.
> I'm not understanding what you mean there? Aren't they making a lot of money for only a little work?
Some are, but at the cost of privacy, having weirdos stalk you online, potential future job prospects, etc. Not to mention the time and money that goes into actually taking photos, curating, responding to messages, etc. It's not as easy as it might seem.
That's the trade off for being any type of celebrity. I don't think selling lewd photos of oneself is something I'd judge a person about and for all I care, it should be normalized even. I mean, thousands of people have their nudes leaked by people whom they trust and accounts get hacked (The Fappening for example). I don't think ha ind your nudes out in the wild should ruin you in any way in this day and age.
And about the privacy, I think online models like Belle Delphine and the likes still have a far greater possibility to appear anonymously outdoors than Hollywood actresses or even state level politicians. In reality, they're not getting paid for supplying photos, appearing in movies or singing into a microphone, they're getting paid for letting the common folk have a voyeuristic view into their private life.
>>>they're getting paid for letting the common folk have a voyeuristic view into their private life.
Many of them aren't doing that honestly: that's why Twitch streamers such as Pokimane and Amouranth have words like "boyfriend" and "husband" banned from their chats. Every time their subscribers find out there's actually another man fucking them in real-life, and the subs have no chance in Hell of being that man, they lose fans.
> that's why Twitch streamers such as Pokimane and Amouranth have words like "boyfriend" and "husband" banned from their chats
I think it is actually much more likely that they have those things banned, because misogynists individuals, such as yourself, constantly bring that narrative up to attack them over that, and make accusations similar to the ones that you just did.
It is kind of similar to how when a women talks on voice chat in a video game, will get stupid comments about them being a woman on the internet.
Sure, it might not be a big deal when it happens the first couple times, but when it happens every single day of their life, it gets old.
Accusations and harassment, such as what you just did, belongs in a similar category of low level attacks, that don't seem like a big deal in a vacuum, but can actually get pretty annoying when hundreds of harassers message you about it, every single day of your life.
This reminds of porn, whereby, once you're out there, then you're out there. Good luck working with kids or anything involving kids. Even females aren't exempt from the scrutiny.
Or any job where guys recognize you, now you're screwed if you have any aspirations to remain anonymous or even lead a normal life. You'll need a community of people supporting you.
It seems like an endeavour where the potential for regrets is high. Look up most pornstar bios and they usually end up with them having a hard time readjusting to the regular world and few ever manage to move past their old life that they end up going back to porn cause it's the only family that accepts them, but at the cost of exploiting them more.
This might not carry necessarily the same stigma, but the fact that many people treat it the same is problematic.
> For everyone who's a pornstar there's another dozen people who used the money to go to college (or whatever their exit is) and start a career.
Source showing that happens with that frequency? While I'm sure there there exists someone who did porn and used the money to springboard to achieve some happy goal, the idea that's the usual outcome seems like a guilt-alleviating fiction. I don't think it even passes smell test, because my understanding is porn doesn't even pay that well [1].
It's not as unskilled as you might think it is. Professionals here put in a lot of thought and effort to their promoting their specific niche, brand, etc. Many of them have a solid understanding of lighting and photography and employ that knowledge to improve their work.
This is about as insulting as saying photography is "unskilled labor". Sure, anyone can take a photograph. But the people who are at the top are generally there because of hard work and business smarts.
Can you articulate how this particular Twitch streamer is employing deep knowledge and thought to improve her work? To the tune of $250k+ compensation? Can't anyone hire someone with experience in theater/film lighting to setup their stream studio with a day's labor?
> "The ‘control show’ I mentioned above plays into this. Give men a way to fight against each other, with tokens. A common tactic is to have guys buy into “teams”, and whichever team tips the most, wins ..."
Did I just learn something about two-party politics?
>>Because there are a lot of pretty women in the world and I would say 99% aren't 1% as successful.
99% of the pretty women aren't leveraging a tech platform to directly extract resources from lonely dudes across the entire planet. It's more due to ignorance of their options for monetizing their sexuality than it is well-developed and unique skillsets. I've actually been debating starting a CamStudio with a friend of mine, as I've met more than a few cute women who don't grasp the concept of "You can make more money by just sitting your butt in front of a computer monitor all day in makeup and a low-cut top". Anyone who has worked in a cabaret, a "girls bar/snack bar", or a strip club understands the basics of talking to the Johns, and appearance-enhancing makeup and outfits. Camming/streaming just combines their social skills with IT/technical support to expand their potential client base. They won't become Belle Delphine overnight but there's a lot of room for low-effort revenue growth with a bit of management and guidance, IMO.
At some point yes you need the business side of things under control and yes there are many finer points to it but that stuff scales very well and most of the actual work is done by people who are nothing more than able bodied and capable of following instructions.
> It's not as easy as it seems, I'm sure. But it's extremely compensated well for what is essentially unskilled labor.
This is a fundamental mistake that people make when discussing this. As in any content market the money is in the head. Both tail and the long tail could do 2x the work of the head and receive nearly no compensation.
Are they staying in the market? If you're doing it for 50 hours a week for barely any compensation, isn't it more of a hobby.
I'm not saying that every cam girl is getting mega rich from it, but they're making good money in relation to the effort required. There's not zero effort but it's also not something you need to go to uni for three years and then spend time as a junior cam girl getting experience. Which is fine, btw, I don't mind it, but I always find it weird when the image is presented blurry as in "we can't really tell whether it's a professional<=>customer relationships or just two people interacting socially", because I think we generally can tell very well.
If you have alternatives to cleaning hotel rooms, it would be. There aren't any for most that work there though. If they didn't make money on Only Fans, normal jobs are still available, and if you make next to nothing, even cleaning hotel rooms might be a step up.
My impression is that many of those that make very little (on the platform, in relation to the top stars) make enough in relation to their time input that it beats cleaning hotel rooms or waitressing.
> But it's extremely compensated well for what is essentially unskilled labor.
skill doesn't determine compensation - supply and demand does. If an action is unskilled, but has high demand and low supply, then said action will fetch a much higher price than another action which requires much skill, but has high supply.
And being on onlyfans is not unskilled - you need skill. Natural born skill is still considered a skill, and you will also need to be photogenic (or video-genic?). Being entertaining is also a skill, tho not always required.
Sure it is. Sometimes I feel guilty watching football and hockey players get their brains knocked around and getting seriously injured. Especially the younger or the less well-known players who presumably aren’t making as much money. But I assume if they’re on the field it’s because they understand the risks and they’ve decided that they’re compensated for those risks through some combination of their paycheck, potential fame, and love of the game.
You have a very different understanding of the word "taboo" than I do. There is no[1] societal shaming of sports stars.
[1] OK, there's some. But very very little - and, usually, due to judgement (deserved or not) about how they employ their wealth, not about _the profession of_ being a sports star.
I am aware of some porn actors promoting "Ethical Porn" whereas paying for porn promotes the creation of this ethical porn. For example, the porn star Jiz Lee has spoken out about it [1] and yes -- Jiz Lee is on OnlyFans.
That said, people will pay for what they want whilst others will pirate for their favorite given reason(s) be it porn, movies, books, audiobooks, &c. Similar for not contributing via Patreon; maybe they'd rather some ads and half the content to not spend a few bucks a month, for example.
So many podcasts operate parasocially as well. Especially during COVID and negative polarization there is a high demand to be able to participate in interesting conversations. For lots of current events podcasts that have a paid tier, the member-only episodes tend to be a lot more social and personal than the main feeds, to say nothing of the zoom calls many of them do.
An excellent video that I've also seen! What I found most interesting about my original video is how Onlyfans and Twitch fills that perfect niche to monetize the parasocial relationship.
There's also the fact that for a small minority of people spending $200 on photos is basically nothing.
I like my money too much to part with it, but realistically if I were to value my time rationally paying $100 for takeout would be a worth while trade when I look at how long cooking takes. Then if I am willing to spend $100 on food, why not on something else I might enjoy?
As I said, I don't, but that feels more like a character preference for investment/hoarding instead of any rational cost/benefit analysis.
You're posting a lot of judgement and not a lot of evidence. You're asserting that this is always driven by loneliness, always harmful, always fundamentally different from things people might spend money on; do you have any basis for that beyond personal incredulity?
I think you are missing something. It isn't about seeing a picture. It is about a fantasy. It is a daydream. The more they "know" and view one person, the deeper that fantasy can become. People are able to delude themselves into a mindset of "if I keep interacting with her, what if she realized how cool I am and we actually got together" or similar.
This gets into what is real and the power of anticipation. There have been a lot of studies that show the biggest endorphin bump for a vacation is in the planning, not actually going and experiencing the locale. This is going to really change as VR matures. People will be having lots of experiences at home in a very immersive way. This includes front row at a concert, walking tours of a far off city or attraction, and obviously VR porn integrated with mechanicals. We have vivid dreams all the time and they are not "real", I think these things will feel even more real for the immersion.
> Right now you and I are having a parasocial relationship. Or what else would you call internet forums? Theirs just pays better.
We aren't. Parasocial relationships are characterized by being unilateral (i.e. subject → object) and idealized (where there's an illusory personal connection). I doubt either of us feels that way :)
Sometimes famous tech people comment on hn. That makes me feel like im rubbing shoulders with giants in the field, while in practice its a unilateral and illusory connection.
This, posting on this site lets me interact with people who would probably never give me the time of day in real life.
It feels like being a handyman who gets to hang around engineers. It's like getting a little taste of what being successful in this field feels like.
In a sense yes. But the main difference here is that on HN, the tech celebrity does not specifically target themselves to people who would like to be rubbing virtual shoulders with celebrities.
Although the term parasocial relationship originally refered to people viewing mass media, this does not strictly seem to be the case for onlyfans. So we're stretching the definition in any case. Although onlyfans is a little bit more of a one way street. What I meant is internet forums fill a similar need for illusory interaction. My relationship to HN is definitely of the illusory personal connection type. I can fool myself into believing that my words actually matter. Yet the hivemind does not even register what I write. Your experience might be entirely different. But if you don't have any type of emotional investment into this, why do you write?
> For years, I was profoundly puzzled by people that are willing to give hundreds -- if not thousands -- of dollars to (mostly women) they'll never meet for what's basically freely available offline.
That's because you seems to misunderstands theirs needs and misunderstands the cost of what you consider "freely available offline". I recently saw a tiktok of a girl crying because she fake one, well they are just putting a price over that effort.
> It's a bit sick that the internet -- the very thing which was supposed to bring people together -- ends up cannibalizing its own.
Yeah, it's something that I realize day after day. In the past it wasn't like this, I've seen so many people make real connections, but since a few years, maybe a decade, making friendship over the internet seemed to have changed (maybe it's just me though).
I feel like you got something with theses fake relationship. They are so much easier to maintains, they are easy source of dopamine and they still "feel" like real ones, but they aren't. Some pay for them sure, but Youtube videos are another cheap ones, mostly the vlog format, are most probably source of many of them.
The same could be said about celebrity. Fans of actresses and actors believe they have a relationship with them. That is why they get so invested in their love lives. A whole industry of gossip and paparazzi has been built to follow the ins and outs of your favourite celebrity.
What is the difference between that and your favourite cam girl or twitch streamer?
My understanding from third party sources (ahem) is that most cam sites are for people who want specific content. Or get off on the power of bossing someone sexually.
The actual lonely hearts are rare and far between.
To go off on a tangent, this gives me a new perspective on the success of Trump. Perhaps his tweets, clearly written by the man himself in the moment, contribute to a sort of parasocial relationship with his "fans."
Certainly in comparison to the professional pr-speak of most other politicians.
AOC, among a very few others, seems to have tapped into something similar.
Yeah, I'm sure of it. People aren't defending his policies because they've given it enough thought and arrived at the same conclusions. You can see it on how clueless many are and how they end up defending him despite many of Trump's acts they themselves know are wrong.
His most enthusiastic fans defend him because they feel a connection to him. Like he cares or wants what's best for them and that he's approachable.
i was surprised when i found out quite a few people i know paid for dating apps like tinder. loneliness is horrible and people are willing to pay for a fix/solution.
Aren’t the women on OnlyFans monetizing it in a positive manner?
Don’t base your world view on anecdotes from a carefully edited documentary. In reality almost all the customers know it’s a fantasy, so what’s wrong with fantasies?
> Don’t base your world view on anecdotes from a carefully edited documentary. In reality almost all the customers know it’s a fantasy, so what’s wrong with fantasies?
I'm not sure what you mean. The documentary seemed fairly middle-of-the-road and interviewed both fans as well as models. It's pretty clear that parasocial relationships aren't healthy (whether it's with a game show host or an Onlyfans model), so I would definitely push back against "almost all the customers know it’s a fantasy."
All documentaries are edited to tell the story the director wants you to hear.
You have no idea whether the interviews are with a realistic sample of the customer base. All it takes is focusing on a couple whackos to make the entire customer base look similar.
And if you made that documentary, who would you focus on? The normals, or the outliers? If you want the most entertaining product that will make you the most money, you’ll choose the outliers.
You could argue the same about Gambling, and yet we as a Society have put measures in to place to prevent such brain-mechanisms from being exploited and abused for monetary gain... despite the individuals feeling like they are "getting their money's worth". Also, see Loot Boxes, same thing.
The difference is that gambling or loot boxes aren't fulfilling a human need. Human connection is a human need. Unless you're offering a solution to the problem that these services are addressing, you're not creating net good in the world, you're just eliminating an accessible way these people have to met a human need.
Loot boxes and gambling could arguably be fulfilling a human need as well. Just depends on your definition of human need. Happiness is a human need and loot-boxes and gambling definitely give that to people on some level.
Further, we need not go into "human need" territory at all. We as a society have also put measures in to place to prevent the vulnerable from being exploited despite their objections (e.g. age of consent / alcohol and smoking age consumption laws).
My take on it, despite being libertarian-minded, is that we should ban/regulate these sorts of things that can have detrimental, generational-impacts on the viability of our society. These individuals should be going out, socializing, eventually fulfilling someone else's need for companionship at the same time as their own, and then procreating to further society. As much as it fulfills their immediate needs, it's a patch that is arguably non-viable in the long term for them and the wider society.
>Loot boxes and gambling could arguably be fulfilling a human need as well.
No. There is a categorical difference between a first-order human need and an nth-order need.
>we should ban/regulate these sorts of things that can have detrimental, generational-impacts on the viability of our society.
This is absurdly paternalistic. This new moralism is frightening. There was a time when religious moralizing dominated society. We finally broke free from that and now the left is replacing it with secular moralizing. Some people seem to have an intrinsic need to control the behavior of others, the justification is mostly ad-hoc.
I am immediately suspicious of any offered moral precept that has zero cost to the advocate. For someone with no problem socializing or finding new friends, I'm sure it seems like a great idea to you.
It turns out few people actually believe in freedom, they just want freedom from other people's arbitrary rules.
Do they stay on the system and continue to pay? Then I'd argue they're not becoming less lonely. It looks more like regular addiction, money buys you a hit, but you'll soon be back to craving more, especially when your general (social) life isn't providing a lot of positivity.
Yes, sure, "we're all addicted to oxygen" etc. When you stop paying for Netflix, you're usually not feeling it emotionally. You might be a bit more bored at night, but that's about it. It seems different when you're paying for pseudo relationships.
Are the men underaged? Mentally incompetent? Is there some other reason that hapless men must be protected from these temptations, but selling them, say, netflix is ok?
Is netflix okay? How many times have you heard the word 'binge' to describe Netflix consumption habits? The language of addiction being used in such a carefree manner as though there's nothing wrong with it makes me uncomfortable and is one of the reasons I cancelled my account.
> This is fundamentally different than being a fan of, say, an actress like Emma Stone, or an athlete like LeBron James.
That's because neither Emma Stone nor LeBron James figured out how to enter into micro transaction relationship with the fan base. Bella Thorne did. The rest will now either have to flip into that mode or lose their celebrity status.
Emma Stone and Lebron don't deal with monetizing micro-transactions with their fan base because they already make so much money that would be a time wasting side-show for the amount of work it would be.
> Social media has created a new type/class of celebrity but it isn't replacing the old ones.
That's no longer the case. Social media celebrities who have not broken into the mainstream celebrity class are on downward trajectory as the social media has been democratized.
No, because this kind of thing is intentionally exploitve and these models make money by exploiting mental illness, particularly loneliness. Even in the case of mobile apps and micro transactions.
I have shamefully worked (for a short time) for a company that used to have serious meetings about how to exploit these types of people.
I've had a lot of friends into camming, and tbh it kinda sucks to watch some of them bend their morals and who they are more and more as it becomes harder and harder to ignore the money that comes with it.
LeBron James licensed the shit out of himself for video games, action figures, commercials, etc - and I'd argue other than the commercials, which are exploitve by nature, none of this is specifically exploiting anyone. It's entertainment.
I'm asexual, but I have absolutely nothing wrong with pornography on principle. I still have friends who cam ethically.
Unfortunately in the past performers more often than not ended up exploited. Now the tables are turning and some performers like Bella just end up exploiting their viewers, and that's just sad.
I mean Bella literally bailed on $200 pay per view stuff and essentially exploited her past as a Disney star, of all things, to draw attention to herself, and as a result has single-handedly irreversibly screwed over the lives of every other performer on the site by forcing monthly instead of weekly payments.
Bella Thorne didn't figure out how do to micro transactions. She thought she could take advantage of her micro celebrity status to give herself an advantage over others, exploited hundreds, and screwed over hundreds, probably thousands of performers.
I have a lot of friends in the sex industry and camgirl industry as the queer communities which I am a part of often are supportive to these folks, and it's awesome that the people who choose to do this non exploitavely can do it. I don't think it's that different in that case from being any other kind of celebrity, except I do believe it is obviously objectively riskier.
> screwed over the lives of every other performer on the site
I don't think what Bella did was right, but in my personal opinion, charging $200 to view some images and soliciting "donations" of over $100 a pop is extremely exploitative, so I'm sorry, but I don't have much sympathy here.
> I mean Bella literally bailed on $200 pay per view stuff and essentially exploited her past as a Disney star, of all things, to draw attention to herself, and as a result has single-handedly irreversibly screwed over the lives of every other performer on the site by forcing monthly instead of weekly payments.
I disagree. She screwed over lives of every other performer on a platform by showing up and running the numbers. Her being a former Disney star was immaterial - she happened to be someone that people fantasize about seeing naked or barely dressed hundreds if not thousands times more than they fantasize about seeing other camgirls, etc. Some of those people were willing to pull out their credit card. The response would have been the same if it were one of the Hadid sisters or the likes of Emma Watson.
> Bella Thorne didn't figure out how do to micro transactions. She thought she could take advantage of her micro celebrity status to give herself an advantage over others, exploited hundreds, and screwed over hundreds, probably thousands of performers.
Either her or someone in her camp convinced her that by doing what she did she would make a massive amount of money based on micro transactions as opposite to getting $20,000-$50,000 appearance fees or $200,000-$2,000,000 deals.
It is no different from celebrity influencers pushing out the micro-influencers by consuming the available market. Those with millions of followers will command more attention and hence more money than those with thousands.
> I have a lot of friends in the sex industry and camgirl industry as the queer communities which I am a part of often are supportive to these folks, and it's awesome that the people who choose to do this non exploitavely can do it. I don't think it's that different in that case from being any other kind of celebrity, except I do believe it is obviously objectively riskier.
The celebrity is measured by the amount of money these people can make via fees. Clearly Bella can make orders of magnitude more than the others which is why we are talking about her and not about a cam girl with 450 paying followers.
> I'd say places like Onlyfans end up being net negatives for both the models as well as the fans.
Someone could argue the opposite: It's a net positive for a model who is able to separate herself from the work and use it as a means to earn money, and it could be a sufficient honeypot for men who would have otherwise become predators.
Personally, I would call it an unhealthy relationship. I think it's vastly in favor of the models because they're making money at the expense of extremely desperate older (i.e. wealthy) men. It's sort of a creepy-man trap, shepherding these men towards the models (remote/safe) and away from potential victims.
How sure are we that these fans are not getting more benefit than we think? Maybe they are paying for the privilige of having an "a la carte" relationship that is impossible in real life. I d really like to see a survey about how these things work, because i doubt it's just neediness - there s probably benefits that justify the amounts spent.
It would take more than "documentaries", which AFAIK are always going for sensational, but false conclusions.
> How sure are we that these fans are not getting more benefit than we think?
Good question. Similar question: how sure are we that the whales in mobiles games or Casinos are not getting more benefit than we think?
The amounts spent are often quite substantial on the fan's side, while they are one among many viewed from the streamer's side. I don't think there's reciprocity.
I would like to see pharmaceuticals coming up with drugs that specifically target addictive reward circuits. then we can get rid of judgmental laws against addictions that some ppl consider "harmful" and instead prescribe antiaddiction medication. If people still like to gamble, then we must accept it s their choice and they need no "help" from us
Once we have those kinds of meds, I'm fairly sure that you see the gambling industry implode. They are hyper-optimizing targeting exactly those reward circuits for a reason.
There's not just the question whether the individual needs to be saved from themselves, there's also the question whether we let the predators roam free.
If someone believed they could cross the Atlantic ocean wearing nothing but shorts and flippers, you get to a difficult decision rather quickly. But if they're drunk and somebody is trying to guide them into a dark alley where you know three of their friends are waiting to rob the person, there's a good moral argument for a) saving that person from their fate and b) disposing of those four who are a net negative contribution to humanity.
It seems similar to romance scams, though managing to fall barely on the right side of the law.
I honestly think they should be deplatformed, one way or another. Young men in their teens and twenties are psychosocially damaged by this style of money-mediated intimacy, and at best they will play catch up with their peers the rest of their lives, and at worst will be permanently stunted. If I had a son, I'd honestly prefer he end up addicted to nicotine than to OnlyFans. (Older men are also damaged, but they're likely lost causes.)
We also need to recognize that men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness, and design public health interventions to help divert men from it and pull men out of it if they find themselves trapped by it.
Most users of platforms like Onlyfans are men over 30.
> Older men are also damaged, but they're likely lost causes
That's quite rude, particularly when you basically say the opposite in the following paragraphs.
> men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness
Men as a class are vulnerable to a lot of things, but they are a hard demographic to reach and, fundamentally, very few people care about their mental health.
Just today, BBC Radio 4 passed a news headline about UK suicide numbers being at their highest in 20 years, with 3/4 of them being men and mostly between 45 and 50 years old. The headline before (risk of quarantine for UK tourists in Portugal) and the one after (Facebook vs Australia on news links) were longer and both had a relevant expert interviewed, but not the suicides one.
can we stop using arbitrary corporate powers to force behavior on people? Everybody is damaged in someone else's mind, how about being tolerant to people's lifestyle choices that have no impact on us
> that men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness, and design public health interventions to help divert men
Interesting. The ancient lawmaker Solon instituted public brothels with a standard fee as a public health measure. But people think that s horrible -- damned if you do, damned if you don't. I guess the suggestion is that people shouldn't have sexuality or desires, they should just cut off their genitals and live as vegetables. O what a world we live in
This is the standard libertarian reply but it’s not really compelling.
Being choosy about your culture and protective of your youth on a societal scale is necessary. Without it, corporations with Billions of dollars will be competing to extract as much value out of children of families with a median net worth of about 40k. And that already massive imbalance is only getting worse and worse, not just through inequality, but through technology where corporations are more and more able to access their entire mind in evermore convincing fashion (VR up next!).
So you’ll take base desires that should be met as naturally as possible (sexual desire met with supervised interaction with peers of the same age) and you suddenly have unlimited virtual reality porn with facetuned, hyper optimized algorithm, AI generated responses, and suddenly you have a new generation of “incels” or similar who were so satisfied by their internet porn addiction that they never were forced to grapple with... well, real women, and the fact that they are absolutely not constantly sexually available and hyper optimized for your pleasure. And then you have Big Problems.
Listen, these are all, like, opinions, man. But with where we are heading with technology. Having seen TikTok and how it’s radicalizing and dopamine retraining a whole generation... I wish the government would get a whole lot more overbearing with requiring regulation - not to ban it per se, but to ensure platforms that provide it must validate age with more than a checkbox, etc. At least that Apple continues to provide evermore effective parental controls.
I think you should consider the extent to which the "normal" culture you are advocating is actually "real" or manufactured via the mass media and hollywood. There are so many ways in which american culture (and its inherent, persistent puritanism) is un-natural to people from so many different countries around the world. Technology is an enabler or a megaphone for our desires, but it doesn't create them.
Then there's the issue of helicopter-like supervision of children. This is a very recent phenomenon and has deprived the latest generations of any 'risky' and unrestricted encounters. I can understand why they feel the need to escape from it, because it really acts like a prison wall. If anything, their online escapades probably help them to grow and discover their own personality.
I didn’t specify normal culture, but I would include media portrayals of normal as included in dangerous and would encourage people to find normality through ancient cultural traditions and religions, not media.
Although Puritan culture is certainly not enhanced by media much at all, if anything the exact opposite.
And helicopter parenting is a totally different thing which I don’t like either.
As long as the incentives are there, the business and technology will follow.
Do you have the same strong feelings about other addictions, like social media in general or gaming? These are industries designed around creating psychological hooks at the expense of their user (some are worse than others).
But the lost causes seem to have a lot of cash if you look into the amount that is spend. Why learn anything or put effort in anything if you just can show your tits for a time and rake in millions?
Should we be surprised people spend that much on porn? I certainly am, especially with its presence almost everywhere today. So there has to be another factor that draws people in. Maybe they have just fun and this is over-analyzing things.
There are 2 very different reasons for using OnlyFans.
1. Sex workers are using it to offer a luxury service (The Girlfriend Experience) to clients, virtually. It's taking something that used to be only available to the very wealthy and making it scalable.
2. Celebrities like Bella Thorne, Tana Mongeau and Cardi B are using it as a means of publicity, similar to the sex tape strategy used by Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.
I though that for Kim Kardashian it was about riding the wave of a fake sex tape and for Paris Hilton an actual leak she didn't profit from (similarly to Jennifer Lawrence)
Everyone claims that it was leaked, but both of the sex tapes were timed to come out during the first season of Keeping up with the Kardashians and the first season of The Simple Life.
Life has a lot of coincidences, but the real question is- were they making lemonade from lemons OR is it artificial lemon juice, something that looks like lemons but isn't?
I'm wondering if what actually happened is that Onlyfans leveraged the backlash around Bella Thorne to implement the limits they have been thinking about for a while, instead of implementing those as a reaction.
Chargebacks are HUGE in this field and all the mitigations you might find as part of your big payment processor don't apply because eg. Stripe don't allow any of this kind of thing on their platform.
I read on HN a few days ago that they use stripe for non sex related models, and ccbill for adult related models. Ccbill is the porn industry’s payment processor but it costs much more.
Ah, wasn't aware. One of my contract positions right now is in a sex worker field and a lot of the infrastructure and billing needs to be done themselves.
It's the same reason why the biggest Twitch stars can do pretty much anything on stream and not get banned, while normies get the banhammer immediately for lesser offences.
He's been banned before for issues like recording in bathrooms at cons. It's all an act but streaming can be a 12+ hour day and it makes sense for his character to 'get banned' especially when Twitch/etc won't comment and he can take a summer vacation. He'll re-enter with some drama that'll make headlines then be back up and running again with plenty of subscribers.
I don't, mostly because he's a celebrity character and anything he says is a PR release from his business. He just seems to trend up with various viral moments or activities like recording/streaming inside a bathroom full of people at a convention. It makes sense that someone who lives (literally) on hype and attention would generate that whenever possible to further their brand, just like a Kardashian. With that in mind, some unspoken ban, real or not/insinuated or not, is an excellent chance to set up a big story when you're back in the office and working again. Easy cover for time off and solid cash back once streaming again.
In certain parts of the Internet, OnlyFans has been a huge deal for a long time, and most definitely not because of what you'd call "celebrities" anywhere outside those parts.
It's also the primary source of income for a decent number of people.
I've never been on Twitch and am only vaguely aware that anything like a celebrity exists in the video-gaming world. Couldn't name one to save my life. (And yes I know Twitch isn't just about games.)
Edit: I have nothing against Twitch, just pointing out that it's easy to think something isn't well-known when it actually is, just not to people like you (or me).
True, but I just don't think the intersection set of those who know OnlyFans and those who know Bella Thorne is very large. We can't say the site is not benefiting from celebrities.
Is it primarily a biological or cultural phenomenon that most creators of this content are women and most consumers of the content are men? Honestly, I don't know if that's true, but from what little this intersects with my news feed it appears to be true.
Most woman can get attention at some appropriate level. Even if not coolest, prettiest, smartest. A lot of man can't. And the way to get together to be attractive is sometimes hard. Better to pay for only fans than to shoot up some place...
But is paid attention worth it, wouldn't it end up making you feel hollow once that interaction is over and you realize how made up the whole thing was.
That logic would say that drugs, junk food, etc. are worth it. Plenty of people spend money on things that bring them no joy in the long term because they feel like they need them in the moment.
It's very difficult to objectively evaluate whether something is universally "worth it" or "hollow" (I'm using terms from the original comment). You have to place yourself as the ultimate judge of "long term" worth, which is a doomed proposition. You're entering the realm of philosophy (or religion, of course).
Why is long term always better than short term? Aren't there people who enjoy junk food, and in fact love it? Is going to the movies a wasteful act, since most movies don't give you long term enjoyment? Is playing videogames? Is having sex with a person you don't intend to marry something that will "leave you hollow"? Is casual sex worthless, or is it only a problem if you pay for it?
I'm not taking a position on the broader question, but the blithe "it must be worth it because people pay for it" is simplistic to the point of being wrong.
But your counterpoints (drugs & junk food) are trivially disproven: for a lot of people, those are truly "worth it". Why, I still remember an argument I had here on HN, years ago, where I said real homemade burgers were way better than McDonald's, and had more than one people reply to me with "nah, sometimes I really want a McDonald's burger, I really enjoy them".
As for prostitution, you have to admit such a long tradition of existing -- the "oldest profession", as the saying goes -- is strong evidence that it's indeed worth it to a lot of people.
I'm not making a moral argument, by the way. Only your own personal convictions, or your religion's, can tell you that.
> But your counterpoints (drugs & junk food) are trivially disproven: for a lot of people, those are truly "worth it".
Where's this trivial disproof? Citation needed.
> You have to admit such a long tradition of existing -- the "oldest profession", as the saying goes -- is strong evidence that it's indeed worth it to a lot of people.
No. It's strong evidence that a lot of people momentarily decide to pay for it. That's not at all the same thing, because addiction exists and is fundamentally not a phenomenon of rationality. A lot of addicts explicitly recognise that the thing they crave won't, and doesn't, make them happy.
Citation needed? I take it you don't trust my word? Because I provided one.
As for your second point about addiction: you are entering the realm of the highly subjective, randomly deciding which things are addicting and which are worthy. I'm uninterested in that discussion. How do you even determine which things are capable of bringing people long term joy and which aren't? Are videogames worthy? Are movies? Is the fleeting less worthwhile than the permanent? Etc.
> As for your second point about addiction: you are entering the realm of the highly subjective, randomly deciding which things are addicting and which are worthy. I'm uninterested in that discussion. How do you even determine which things are capable of bringing people long term joy and which aren't? Are videogames worthy? Are movies? Is the fleeting less worthwhile than the permanent? Etc.
I'm not saying you have to agree with me about which things are or aren't worthy. All I'm claiming is that it is possible for something to be addictive and not worthwhile, and so to show that something is worthwhile you need to do more than showing that someone was willing to pay for it. Do you disagree with that much?
> Well, good old prostitution has been pretty successful since the dawn of mankind, so the answer must be "yes" for a lot of people.
To be fair, much like drug dealing, it's not clear how "successful" prostitution is.
Much like anything else, there is a power law distribution in effect. A few make a lot of money, but a lot make very little.
Of the women I have known on that path, I know of only two who actually didn't wind up in a bad place at the end. Drug addiction was the primary problem--if you work in the sex industry you work with a LOT of scumbags who want to hook you on drugs in order to control you.
You're replying from the point of view of the providers (the prostitutes), but the question I answered was about whether paid attention "was worth it" from the point of view of the clients. It obviously is, otherwise prostitution wouldn't have been so widespread for so long.
> It obviously is, otherwise prostitution wouldn't have been so widespread for so long.
Maybe, but "It's worth it" encompasses from "I have lots of choice and can afford it." (Heidi Fleiss clients) to "I have no other means of access so it's this or nothing." (the slum streetcorner)
Smart drug dealers, like smart prostitues, generally make a ton of money in a short time, 4-5 years, and get the hell out while they can and invest in something.
I know a handful of people who have been hugely successful at doing both.
Exactly. A handful. And everybody else gets pulled into a terrible world.
This is similar to high school sports in terms of percentages (but probably not quite such a terrible adverse outcome). A handful do well. The rest would have a MUCH better life spending that energy on education/trade/anything else instead.
Wow, that's such a valid point. The number of kids who go into sports is ridiculous, and it's just...it's not a career. Just like drug dealing isn't a career. tbh the average NFL player's career isn't going to last too much longer than the average smart drug dealer or prostitute.
> But is paid attention worth it, wouldn't it end up making you feel hollow once that interaction is over and you realize how made up the whole thing was.
We pay for lots of (social/emotional) illusions in entertainment. People tend to suggest that this is a risk of the kind of illusions they don't indulge in, and you certainly can see examples of it with lots of those illusions, but I don't think it's exclusive to any of them.
Though in the illusion of personal connection, it's probably more dangerous to the seller when the buyer gets lost and expects reality instead of illusion.
If you can get paid attention then you can get free attention. I would imagine a lot of these female performers are already in relationships. They just work very hard to conceal their relationships online in order to preserve the illusion for their fans.
I was talking about the males who are paying, not the female performers. They definitely should be able to get attention, and for them from an economic opportunity perspective this makes complete sense.
Oh in that case I don't think they realize how hollow it is, at least not at first. The top performers (on Twitch, anyway, I have never visited OnlyFans) work very hard to keep their top donors happy. They thank them profusely, grant them moderator status, single out their chat messages to read and respond to on stream, and likely even chat with them in private messages after the stream. Anything to maintain the illusion that this is a real relationship rather than a transactional one. This is why OnlyFans was created in the first place: a site outside of the rules of Twitch terms of service that lets performers take things "to the next level" with their top donors. It's like the VIP room in a strip club.
Edit to add more thoughts: I think strip clubs are the right analogy for how to evaluate these channels (the "just chatting" ones and any of the gaming ones that prominently feature very attractive performers). They are fundamentally about creating and maintaining an illusion with the (usually male viewers). Unfortunately, this can be very dangerous. It's pretty common knowledge that strippers are much more likely to suffer violence than the average woman. They may be safer than street-walking prostitutes, but nowhere near as safe as a woman in a white-collar job.
How safe are these streamers in the long run? The distance and pseudonymity provided by the internet may afford a level of safety, compared to the closeness of a strip club. On the other hand, streamers can have several orders of magnitude more viewers than even the largest of strip clubs. A large viewer count can magnify the risk that one disillusioned fan decides to "go rogue" and stalk the streamer, dox her, and attack her in person. I would not be surprised if we see a case of serious violence (or murder) against a top streamer within a few years.
Realistically, the streamers are safe. You can't really compare it to a girl working in meat space, who is potentially being threatened by not just her clients, but also the management of the club, potentially her own pimp, other pimps and maybe other girls in the business as well.
Streamers getting doxxed is not really a thing, and they have viewers from around the world. Anyhow, I think your concern is not warranted, otherwise we would already be hearing more about these kind of incidents.
I have heard of a few incidents like this happening to Kpop groups, but there you have 1) mega audience 2) crazy fans 3) physical interaction (concerts) so streamers at least at an advantage re: 3.
...what?! I mean, really? I have friends who have had this issue, I am baffled by this perspective. It's always been an issue, it will always be. What?
> I have heard of a few incidents [...] but there you have [...] crazy fans
Is there no "crazy fans" in the OnlyFans/Twitch community? I'd argue that the probability of crazy/mentally unstable fans would be a lot higher in this weird "parasocial relationship" environment compared to a typical music band fanbase.
it is likely that the gender ratio in the creators (or market size) is linked to the sexual preferences of the (predominantly male) audience.
I mean, I suspect that the gender imbalance in "willing to pay for lewdness and smiles" is greater than the imbalance for "willing to sell lewdness and smiles"
This is a good question and is something I’m wondering too. The same phenomenon is occurring on Tinder, where women will get hundreds of matches and men will get less than 10.
People associated with alt-right say this is because women have built-in hypergamy and only ever trade up partners. According to this line of thinking, a woman would rather share a top male and be a part of a harem than have an average man all for herself. I don't have enough experience or data to prove or disprove it.
similarly to you I don't know what to comment on that, but an interesting trivia is that (in terms of cis hetero preferences) the median woman is above average and the median man is below average.
but as always we should be wary using too much deduction on soft science topics
Sexual reproduction evolves convergently from the fusion of similar gametes (isogamy) to those of dissimilar gametes (anisogamy).
Sexual differentiation produces dimorphic sexual asymmetry, a binary mating system of two types. Males produce many small gametes, females produce few large gametes.
Factored by the expensive cost of selection, copulation, gestation, and rearing, and females are naturally inclined to be more selective.
In a sellers market where everyone wants to buy, humans mate assortatively.
I highly recommend ‘The Evolution of Insect Mating Systems’ (1983) by Randy Thornhill and John Alcock. The diversity of insects provide excellent insight into the evolution of sexual reproduction.
From what I understand Bella Thorne promised full nude images. When the image that users payed for wasn't full nude this upset many users. Since OnlyFans lacks a refund system many users issued charge backs in order to get their money back. The large number of chargebacks are what prompted OnlyFans to make the changes.
For the Bella Thorne case in particular, it seems like it could be handled by onlyfans creating their own refund/fraud system.
Returning money received fraudulently seems reasonable and unlikely to be challenged by content creators (whom you are presumably clawing it back from). A short "escrow" period to enable this seems unlikely to be challenged by content creators.
The problematic case for chargebacks are probably "all the other ones" that aren't demonstrable fraud.
A refund system for this type of content is tough and is already why a lot of card processors don’t like dealing with porn.
There will be a lot of people abusing this system to essentially pirate porn - and I’m also unsure if only fans has the type of workforce to review every case
But why are card processors annoyed by chargebacks? It's pretty much the reason why these companies exist in the first place, and it should be considered normal part of their life.
Because it's extra work for them. The card company has charged the user, and then sent the money onward to the provider, when the user requests a chargeback, the card company gives the money back to the user, and attempts to take the money back from the provider. This requires human interaction in some cases, and therefore money ... so credit card companies don't want this.
this wouldnt suprise me, i remember back when i was working with adult content, we couldnt sell subscriptions over a certain price, even if they were for years. i think this rule is still in place.
I spend about a hundred a month on OnlyFans. There are some performers I really enjoy and I’m glad to support their work.
I’ve been single for ten years after an engagement ended in her attempted suicide. OnlyFans is a controlled, safe form of sexual interaction for me that doesn’t risk a relationship going horribly wrong again.
I also pay a cuddlist to cuddle with me twice a month.
Also, OnlyFans seems like a more ethical way to consume porn than going through a tube site where you don’t know if the upload was consensual or if it was produced by an exploitative studio or whatever.
I make more than enough to cover my living expenses, be debt free and still save half my income. This is a small discretionary expense for me.
It's to feel a connection. Porn is free. Connection is not. Creators who sell a connection make the most money. It's the same reason why guys will donate to male Twitch streamers - they want to feel like they're best friends. The streamers feed this fantasy to keep the dollars rolling.
I think it's likely also some amount of wanting to support people. I know I've added subscriptions to some streamers I've always watched because I'm watching more of their content now that I'm at home all the time. It only seems fair to pay them for their work if they're entertaining me for an hour or two each day.
I don't care if they think I'm their friend. They're providing a service that I enjoy and I should pay for it, especially now when I have the money to do so and other people may not. If you could pay $5 a month for weekly episodes of your favorite TV show, I'm guessing most folks would?
That's true. I should've clarified that I was referring to whales. People who are donating five figures are much more likely to fall into the "I want them to be my best friend" category.
I used to subscribe to Twitch streams of pros that would play the game with their subscribers. 5 bucks a month to play a game I love with a professional? Heck yes. Playing soccer with Messi would cost a ton more.
Slightly shameful plug: I wrote about Bella/OF in my most recent newsletter issue.
Connection is free for me. I've slept with tens of women without paying a penny. The problem here is the huge inequality that exists in the male population when we let things go back to nature. Religion is dead. Marriage is dead. Women are free and everyone is suffering apart from the top percentiles of men.
First, porn isn't an homogeneous good. So you might not pay for creator 1 but creator 2 is what you want to see and if it's not available for free you might pay.
Second, OnlyFans much like Patreon, isn't just about nudes it is more about the perceived personal connection to the creator. You get the opportunity to message your favorite creator directly and get responses. Some people value that personal connection more than others.
> Is there a reason why people would want to pay for this OnlyFans content? Genuinely interested.
The same reason people would want to pay for porn, I guess... the difference is that they get some kind of "exclusive" pornography. I see it has become a serious money making gig for some. Making $8000 is no small money for a lot of individuals. Definitely more than the average engineer salary in Europe.
It has. I think that the content creators are going to wind up with a lot of competition, just like pornhub, and a lot of them simply won't make it while others will get into more extreme/taboo things and enjoy their lucrative niche.
There was a solid fourteen seconds (or however long it takes Youtube to auto-play the next video) where I considered paying for an OnlyFans subscription of a lady who did satirical wall street business news analysis on YouTube. And then the next video played and I forgot about it until now. Granted the sample size is small but I think the conversion rate would be poor.
I just remember a summer class at college. Some prat made the observation that everyone in the room was paying $40/hour for instruction and there were 25 of us.
I wonder why Instagram is not doing this; free tier are your profile photos premium are paid ones. But there should be a line between non adult and adult, YouTube chose not to host porn and I think they did the right thing.
That's what many use Instagram for now, though, just a vehicle to their OnlyFans account.
Unfortunately, the OnlyFans "creators" have also flocked to reddit and spam it relentlessly. So bad that quite a few subreddits have had to ban "sellers" who were drowning out the other users.
Even outside of app stores, adult content in general is a massive hole that no large company wants to touch. There's a ton of overhead due to scams/chargebacks, harm to the brand, content moderation and lots more.
I forgot adult apps are banned on App Store and Play Store, so adult apps can only run on Android devices by providing .apk file to users while being completely banned on iOS?!
When somebody like Bella Thorne wants to "destigmatize" sex work, what exactly is he she talking about? Does she just want more people to respect the profession outright? Because I think there are a number of hurdles to this, even if we completely ignore traditional views on sex/relationships that a huge fraction of the country holds. Sex workers are luxury service workers. The job is transient and alienating. I feel like there are legitimate reasons to be wary of sex work, even if you don't subscribe to "all sex for all people must be in dedicated long term relationships".
She's trying to get richer by being associated with sex without actually getting involved with it. She's "appropriating" sex work into a PG-13 version that further marginalized the people she claims to be supporting, while financially outcompeting them.
IT work is transient and alienating too, but people do it because it pays the bills for their skills
Sex workers are workers. But they don't have the same labor protections as any other blue collar or white collar job. The stigma from a cultural side is pretty small, especially given the millions of dollars flowing into online sex work.
The stigma from sex work being in a legal grey zone affects those who rely on the income to support themselves and their family.
Also I would be interested to know what other professions you consider "luxury service work" since I can't seem to find a proper definition readily.
Is the stigma not on both sides of sex transactions? In my circles I don't think anyone would boldly profess to being a regular at a brothel. Parent post asked a legitimate question, it's not clear how she intends to remove stigma on sex work.
Definitely agree with you on the labor protections - they are gig workers at the end of the day. And they're probably even less likely to "organize" (whatever that means nowadays) than other gig workers.
By luxury service work, I mean something where you perform services for people with much higher than average disposable income. Basically think of all the bottom rung jobs in the most expensive parts of the most expensive cities.
Destigmatizing sex work is ironically bad for sex workers because it massively increases the supply by removing a major barrier to entry (the associated stigma of being a sex worker.)
Yeah, it's meant in the sense of respect. People who discuss "destigmatizing sex work" are saying they want it to be something like creating Youtube videos or running an Etsy shop: not necessarily a stable career, but something you wouldn't be embarassed for people to discover.
It is strange that we think its repugnant to shower someone with money for leveraging their beauty but then think it is awesome to give millions to someone due to their athleticism, charm, etc. Maybe it flies too much in the face of our 'hard-work = success' mentality.
We can fool ourselves and attribute actors and athletes success to hard-work. It has a bit of truth to it, but a beautiful woman getting thousands a month just for being hot and talking into a camera might be too blatantly unfair for us to ever view it without some stigma.
being a professional athlete doesn't take hard work? just because you and I may not have the innate natural talent to play in the NFL doesn't negate the fact that everyone there has dedicated their lives to training. I don't waste my time watching sports and I hate most celebrities but comparing professional athletes and acting at the highest levels to posting a picture of your butthole online is ridiculous.
So how do you cater to thirsty dudes? If you can harness women, then you are rich. Simple as that. Notice how anything like this will always be male owned. It might seem like women are profiting in the short run, but ultimately they have nothing unique to offer and as supply increases they'll see diminished returns. Meanwhile the male owned business will only grow as demand won't shrink and they're creaming off all of it.
You can't do much about it. Thirsty men willing to pay for content, and women looking to make easy money will always exist. As long as a market like that exists, someone will create something to facilitate it, whether its a man or a woman, it really doesn't make any difference. As long as no one is getting hurt in the exchange, i don't really see why it is anyone's business but i do hope, lonely men with no money aren't raking up credit card debt over this.
Self improvement and self help (real or just promised) are big ways to make money in this area.
>Notice how anything like this will always be male owned.
I don't think it makes a difference to the individual creators whether the middle-man profiting from this is male or female. The creators don't get any better outcome either way.
Yes. But it's all about dangling the carrot of promised sex in front of men, no matter how you dress it up. Self help is like selling a cookery book while porn is like selling a takeaway. Most people will go the route of instant gratification rather than a slow and difficult path.
Lot of self help content can also be more about feeling good while you're consuming it, than actual lasting change. Even if it's generally good advice. This guy made a video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmLTLkCBSN8.
And it's natural to blame the consumers for any failure rather than the material ("you're just doing it wrong", "it's your fault you didn't apply it correctly", etc.), which makes selling mediocre and just plain weak content very easy.
I honestly don't know what to think about the whole situation.
In some ways, it feels like current content creators on OnlyFans are making the same complaints about Bella Thorne that certain communities were making about content creators on OnlyFans before.
And there ain't no shame in their game. If people want to give OnlyFans creators money for any reason, as long as the money is theirs to give, etc, that's between them. What I think of the transaction is immaterial. It's about as useful as the closet full of Lego sets I have.
And if people want to buy that content, why complain about the people providing it. No, it's not typically hard work. And let's all not pretend that it is. But. So what. Some people were just born wealthy. Some people just win the lottery. Or have some other windfall. Not all wealth is earned through hard work. That's just the way it is. I mean, look at all the people featured in the article. They're all attractive women.
And more power to them if they've found a way they don't have to work hard to earn themselves some money.
But it really feels like the current creators are complaining about Throne because she doesn't have to work as hard. Or that she's had automatic reach due to her celebrity status. That she doesn't even have to get nude to get this money.
And that's the complaints made about the majority of creators by the people who cannot leverage the platform like they can.
And it's not like the money sent to Thorne was going to affect the money sent to other creators. It's not like OnlyFans has $X a month to split between creators based on subscriptions. No, individuals choose to subscribe to specific creators. The people signed up to subscribe to Thorne weren't subscribing to OnlyFans because they like OnlyFans, they were signing up to OnlyFans to subscribe to Thorne. Take her away and they don't even sign up.
And the cap limits are another thing in this debacle. They're trying to put the blame for that on Thorne, but really, that's a move that was going to come sooner or later. OnlyFans needs the subscribers more than the creators. The content is pretty fungible in all honesty. So OnlyFans will take measures to make sure the bleed is as slow as possible.
On the other hand, I get why they're frustrated by all this. It can be difficult to watch someone waltz in and crush something you've been chipping away at for a while. It can be difficult to have the terms of a platform suddenly change under you and impact your income. Those are valid frustrations. I'm just not sure if it's a frustration that's actionable on their part. I think they just may have to suck this one up.
The alternative is also to stake out on their own and create their own platforms. OnlyFans is not quite the only game in town putting videos and posts behind a paywall.
“She charges up to $40 for lingerie pictures and videos or for content that implies nudity; $165 for topless photos and $200 for nude images and videos.”
I don’t get it. Who has the income to drop hundreds of dollars on pictures like this?!?!
The internet is filled with tons of free images and videos. I can’t see the point. I guess the “item” being sold isn’t just the image/video but rather the “interaction” and maybe personalization.
Didn't one of the android guys get into trouble for paying attractive girls a full time salary in exchange for them doing what he tells them to do? How's that any different from paying a girl on OnlyFans to produce a custom nude photo? I presume both is more about demonstrating power than about the value of the end result.
> The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”
No, not finding a role in society where you generate a lot of value in the type of transactions people are willing to pay for keeps you from being a rich person.
You can become wealthy simply through hard work and being frugal. There are a ton of fields where it’s easy to make a 6 figure income doing ethical legitimate work, and computer programming is a huge one.
Save 50% of your salary for 20 years, invest at even a mediocre rate and you will be a multimillionaire and able to retire on a 6 figure income for the rest of your life.
The difference between you the vast majority of the self made wealthy isn’t ethics, it’s drive, ambition, and the willingness to forgo luxuries.
> There are tons of things people are willing to pay for that would also be unethical to facilitate
such as?
If you exclude illegal acts, i cannot think of what unethical, but high demand goods/services there are that are currently under-served. Gambling, prostitution and other such vices? All highly competitive.
There are many. A lot of Pyramid/MLM schemes are legal but basically all unethical.
The hologram bracelet and other similar 'products' are unethical.
As for this article and OnlyFans. I don't see a problem with selling nudes (although some people might), but what I gives me pause is the analysis that the 'fans' think they're buying intimacy and friendship. If that is the case, this is highly unethical unless you actually provide some sort of a real human relationship (which of course would not scale very well).
So do you derive your ethics from legality, i.e to you believe that if something is legal it is automatically ethical, and if something is illegal that is automatically unethical?
For example I find Loot Boxes to be a highly predatory and unethical way of monetization in gaming yet they are legal, I also find it completely ethical for a person to grow a certain plant in their home garden but it is illegal...
Advertising? You make your money based on a few brands paying you big $$$ in exchange for you inconveniencing everyone else (who didn't ask for anything and often has no choice - very few platforms allow paying to opt-out of ads) by showing them ads.
Perhaps you underestimate just how much people like to be fans: Some people spend thousands of dollars on a baseball if it's signed by a particular person. And $200 is cheap compared to a print of Elvis that's been signed by him. It's not even a nude print and you're not even giving him the money!
Broadly speaking I have found many people aching for the smallest shred of sentimentality. This is what she's selling. The only amazing thing is just how little people will buy.
Both the baseball and Elvis print have some monetary value to them though. I don't buy much in terms of collectors items, but when I do it's always under the thought that I will always be able to get my money out of it if I wanted.
I don’t believe that the value of memorabilia is ultimately driven by some sort of pyramid scheme, as would be implied if the only value to a collector is what they could sell it for.
I would argue that the value is ultimately driven by people who want to own an item at a given price. People who are Elvis fans may want to buy an item and hold it forever, because of the nostalgia value for them.
The collector's value is what allows for the high market value though, because it can substitute for some other store of value. You have some money, instead of keeping it as cash in a mattress or shares of the Dow Jones, you buy some memorabilia which is expected to hold its value or increase. Then you get to enjoy it, but the value is still there if you need to liquidate it.
It basically allows you to have the thing for only the difference between its investment value and the (presumably higher) investment value of an index fund, rather than having to pay its full price with no hope to ever get it back. Which causes the market price to be a lot higher than it would be otherwise.
I'm reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics and the idea of inherent value is addressed in the 2nd chapter:
“The most fundamental reason why there is no such thing as an objective or “real” value is that there would be no rational basis for economic transactions if there were. When you pay a dollar for a newspaper, obviously the only reason you do so is that the newspaper is more valuable to you than the dollar is.
At the same time, the only reason people are willing to sell the newspaper is that a dollar is more valuable to them than the newspaper is. If there were any such thing as a “real” or objective value of a newspaper—or anything else—neither the buyer nor the seller would benefit from making a transaction at a price equal to that objective value, since what would be acquired would be of no greater value than what was given up. In that case, why bother to make the transaction in the first place?”
I understand that it is a vocabulary choice, but I take issue with calling the price non-objective in that case.
As a toy example, imagine Alice farms Bananas and Bob farms Apples, but each is only able to eat the other food. They would both happily trade forever as they both gain value from this. This doesn't mean that the value is _subjective_, it means the value is _situational_, and I think the rigid vocabulary term and the connotations of the word are conflated a lot.
Assuming this scenario implies each needs to eat 1 banana and 1 apple, the Thomas Sowell outline still holds: Alice, having 2+ bananas, needs 1 apple more than the extra banana. And vice versa for Bob. Any bananas/apples beyond those needed to eat don't have any value at all.
The value in your example is still subjective. What is the ratio of Bananas to Apples that is being traded and how much is being produced? While both are certainly willing to keep trading indefinitely, and to not do so would be catastrophic, but the actual price being paid is very subjective to the market players.
This is what happens when the language is unclear - the word "value" has different meaning in each context.
"Value" as in "utility", and "value" as in "currency" or unit of account.
When trading some currency for utility, each side of the transaction gains something more than what they gave up. The buyer of food got food they needed to eat. The seller of food (presumably has so much food they cannot eat it all) gains extra currency that they can use elsewhere.
The value of a newspaper depends on how many I have. If I have none, I want one, but probably not two. If I printed a million, I just want to sell them (and amortize what I paid the staff).
But the Elvis was the one and only "King of Rock and Roll", and these are sex workers (for the lack of better word) who don't have anything that isn't already provided by thousands of other sex workers (or rather millions).
You're underestimating how much expendable income some people have. I probably am too, and I'm amazed at how much money goes on in e.g. Onlyfans, twitch (donations / subscriptions), youtube (ads, subs), patreon, etc.
Obviously must be underestimating because I feel like I’m in the wrong job reading this stuff!
Overall it’s a good thing that the internet can provide the “long tail” for content when it used to be dominated by a few major players, often with big barriers to entry.
For example I’m happy to buy self-published tech books. Thorsten Ball’s “Writing an interpreter / compiler in Go” series comes to mind. Those books don’t see the light of day in the old model. His books are well written and original.
So if you have a niche and someone produces content, esp high quality content, then by all means support it. But saying someone’s name in a live stream, sending some nude photos, etc. doesn’t seem to have much original value.
If you have a specific attachment to some celebrity in particular, there is a high chance that the internet is in fact not full of them, even for an infinite price.
And, if the pictures/vids have been leaked, there are still people who will pay for personalized content, in which the celebrity personally mentions the payer's name or has a conversation with them or etc.
But the internet isn't full of pictures that were taking specifically for you and accompanied by personal correspondence to you. the product isn't the pictures. The product is an experience, likely to do with power and not sex. The feeling of control. The feeling that you're able to tell someone what to do. The feeling that you're participating in taboo.
Ambitions? Like what ambitions should single guys harbour that are so expensive? Scaling Everest is a good one but it's still kind of a dangerous way to get rid of excess income. And cold too.
Most single guys that have hobbies that arent OnlyFans (or strip clubs, the meatspace equivalent), would usually be doing something like cars, drinking, clubbing, traveling, computers/gaming, or sports
My interpretation wouldn't be that ambitions are expensive monetarily, but rather in terms of time. I've got various hobbies where spending more money doesn't really get me anywhere - if I was more ambitious, I'd need to scale down my work to somewhere between 0-50% FTE to devote more time to a particular hobby.
I get not getting it. But whenever I find myself in that position, I walk over to my closet full of Lego sets. That's pointless as well. But, you know, I have a $700 Star Destroyer.
I was just basically saying that I don't have to "get" why someone would want to spend money for nude pictures of people. I'm sure lots of people wouldn't get buying Lego sets either. But I do it because I like it.
Here are pictures of the closet with non-Lego stuff cut out.
Lego1 contains sets I've built but are currently disassembled, with the exception of the Voltron which is at my office. I have the boxes for far fewer sets than are currently contained within those boxes. I typically keep the boxes only for certain sets.
Lego2 has pictures of the UCS Falcon and the UCS Star Destroyer. The Falcon was built and displayed, but is currently disassembled. The Star Destroyer has not been opened yet. The container underneath has the instructions and some sets in box I haven't built yet.
Lego3 is mostly unbuilt/unopened sets. You can also see my containers of loose bricks. Much older sets from throughout life.
Lego4 is the stuff on top of that. The NES set is currently built and on display.
Each picture represents probably anywhere from $1000 to $3000 worth of sets.
This is a big part of it, at least in smaller communities.
People want to show their gratitude. It's more relevant to the Twitch conversations. OF is basically all paid members where twitch, the ratio is probably 20:1 or worse, free to paid.
The people who are paying are doing so because they want to, not because they have to. That's one big difference between Twitch and Onlyfans.
I suggest to go a few hours to twitch and check out how people throw money at the screen for really no value, and in this case there is actual value (you have topless pics others dont have).
The lack of value is the hardest thing to grasp. I wonder how the creators feel. Obviously they like the pay day but do they every feel like taking in a lot of money for little value. (Although I’m sure they rationalize the value in their head.)
> The lack of value is the hardest thing to grasp.
Value is subjective. Just because you don't think it has a lot of value doesn't mean the people paying for it don't.
Plenty of people probably think plenty of the things you pay for don't have as much value as you place on them. In a market economy, it's naturally the people that (ceteris paribus) value a thing the most that end up buying it.
To say that value is subjective does not mean that we cannot rank things. Clearly some things are more valuable than others. To give a computer science analogy it’s like say that just because numbers are infinite you cannot count them.
> To say that value is subjective does not mean that we cannot rank things.
Unless you mean “...according to one set of preferences”, it means exactly that..
> Clearly some things are more valuable than others.
No, you are again trying to make your own preferences and objective yardstick of value. Something's are more valuable to to some people, and these things are also less valuable to other people.
While there are lots of reasons to argue it's not an ideal aggregate (e.g., and this is far from the only factor, because people don't enter transactions in the same starting position, so preexisting wealth weights things) markets are one of the mechanisms of aggregating preference to arrive at “value”.
> To give a computer science analogy it’s like say that just because numbers are infinite you cannot count them.
No, saying that subjective value can't have objective ranking is more like saying that because there isn't a bijection between reals and naturals, the reals aren't countable.
Iam consuming twitch for about 2 years now and started with gaming streams (Usually I play one game casual and looking for some streamer that fits skill and personality wise and watch him/her - right now this is magic for me).
I didnt mean the no value as in "you get nothing back for your money". Streaming is hard work - I dont doubt that. And it entertains me a lot so I dont mind paying some money.
But OTH I watched a streams where people literally donated thousands of dollars to the streamer (In the specific case even twitch refused to take the money and banned the person who spend it because they thought of money laundering). Iam really interested how this will develop the future of media consumption. Also I feel older every day.
You could get a good chair for way way less though. Matter of fact I'm sitting on a $30 couch right now. Which is probably what that chair of yours is worth after you buy it. What made you spend the other $170? Perhaps it gave you a good feeling? Maybe the picture did the same...
Humanity in general need these things: food, shelter & love / societal interactions.
So much money is spent on things outside these necessities that I would argue for a particular person it's much more valuable than a chair. Buying "love" even temporarily might be better for the psyche than buying that new flatscreen that is just slightly improved than the old flatscreen.
I think most of these things rely on whales. I know mobile games and twitch streamers receive a massive amount of money from less then 1% of their audience dropping obscene amounts of money. I imagine it's the same here.
People don't pay for porn, they pay for specific porn. "Specific" porn can come in many varieties: the person, the act, the body type, personal touch, etc.
You probably make all your own money, pay all your bills and save for retirement. But you’d probably be surprised how many people aren’t doing at least one of these three, and how easy spending is for them.
Very true. My wife remarked once how sad she feels for some friends that we know that are poor. I added things up, if you subtract my retirement savings, and both our house payments (their house is significant smaller/cheaper than ours) we both have about the same amount of spending cash each month to work with. Of course my plan is to someday retire and live like a king, their plans is to live off of social security...
> I don’t get it. Who has the income to drop hundreds of dollars on pictures like this?!?!
I know several people that now have that to spend because they aren't taking public transit anymore and another gave up a $300/mo parking place in New York.
Now he's spending a bunch of the money he should be saving on OnlyFans, "Premium snapchats" and Fortnite.
People want pictures of those that they interact with on a regular basis/are attracted to. Otherwise sexting wouldn't be as large of a phenomenon as it is.
I'd pay a few hundred dollars for nudes of some women I know if they're happy to sell them with informed consent. Seeing someone you know naked is a lot more interesting than seeing a random person naked.
This. It's strange how many people will rationalize that all nude images are interchangeable, so no one should pay for porn. It's so obviously not true for most people.
That's the real issue. The target isn't people who can afford it, it's any horny guy, whether they are rich or poor. Rich people won't actually be affected by it, but it keeps some poor people in misery.
Also I would guess poor people are more likely to lack intimate affection, so they are probably the most common profile.
They don't have the income, but they spend the money anyway.
Strange response by OF, to cap the fees. They're actively limiting their own take (20% cut btw, kind of disgusting).
I think the right thing to do would have been to refund those whom she defrauded with false advertising. If I understand the situation, she sold photos as one kind of content, but delivered something else in the end?
If I bought a bag of potatoes but it turned out to be charcoal when I opened it, I'd bring it back to the store for a refund or exchange.
What happened is that the actual head showed up and squeezed everyone else into a tail. Previous tail has been pushed out into a long tail.
If you have had a chance to work with the companies in the content scene, you would recognize the pattern. A couple of top tier accounts (head) account for the lion's share of hot content and hence monetization, the next level of accounts (tail) - dozens to hundreds - has some hot content and hence monetization but at a fraction of the previous tier. Finally the rest of the accounts have nearly no hot content and hence no monetization (long tail).
From an outside perspective based strictly on the content itself it is very difficult to determine the difference between tail and long tail. It is even unclear the difference between some of the long-tail and the head.
>Ms Michelle has 550 fans and makes $8,000 a month, charging a $30 subscription fee to users. She also relies on tips ranging from $5-$200 for pay-per-view photos, videos and text messages.
>She says her OnlyFans work is the only way she can support her family due to the pandemic, and fears many other content creators will struggle to make ends meet going forward.
Thanks. I'm not familiar. I know that Twitch, for instance, has a separate concepts for subscriber (pays money) and follower (wants updates on the person).
>She says her OnlyFans work is the only way she can support her family due to the pandemic, and fears many other content creators will struggle to make ends meet going forward.
Really? There's always working at Walmart, Target or even collecting an income from Patreon?
Can you really support a family working at Walmart? I can’t even imagine trying to do that. Rent in a modest apartment in my town would be like 2/3 of your income.
It isn't an easy life. You get a tiny apartment and share bedrooms. Parents (more likely parent though) often sleep in the living room. Not all apartments will allow this but enough will that you can find a place. There is enough money for shelter and food, and the cheap cable TV, so that is your entertainment.
It isn't a bad life, but you are limited away from a lot of the things most of us enjoy.
I know people who have done it. I went to college and want my kids to do the same so they don't have to live that life. Unfortunately most in that life don't realize that it wouldn't be hard to get their kids out of it. They are eligible for a lot of programs that the rest of us can't get to take care of the costs, but if you don't realize that the effort of applying yourself is worth it they won't get you out and the cycle repeats.
If your only option available is a Walmart job, you definately should NOT be having kids. Society used to judge things like irresponsible pregnancies, and everybody were way better off because of that.
Fertility rate scales with poverty. Those earning middle-class wages or higher tend to have fewer kids, or none. Much is linked to education and access to contraceptives. People will have sex, period. Shaming people for having kids helps at nothing.
> Society used to judge things like irresponsible pregnancies, and everybody were way better off because of that.
Revisionist delusional fantasy. In Western society people had far more children a couple of generations ago, regardless of wealth. The Church pressured this as well.
Yes, people tended to have way more children. And pregnancies out of wedlock were way less prevalent too. Having two Walmart paychecks instead of one per household will make it way easier to raise a family. But nowadays single moms are heralded as heroes... so-much-progress. Such progressive times.
This is such an awful and tone deaf comment. Reproduction is a fundamental biological need.
We should not be denying people who are exploited by our economy this biological right. What we should be doing is lifting up the worker to a baseline of dignified living.
I sincerely hope you will take a few minutes and reflect on your statement that poor people should not have kids, and that society should somehow punish them for doing so.
Do you really think that everyone can work at Walmart, Target, etc? And I'm referring to the fact that those companies can hire only so many people in one location.
Sure, I am all for creators not going to work at a grocery store, there are other options for them to make an income, and it doesn't even have to be forever.
Retail jobs introduce a higher risk of catching corona, pay terribly (likely close to minimum wage, which isn't enough), are terrible banal working environments, require travel to and from each day, have schedules that might not work for this person, etc.
There are tons of valid reasons why someone can't "just get a job at Walmart".
That sounds a lot like my job as a Paramedic, actually.
At least Walmart got hazard pay. We were specifically exempted from it.
I too lack sympathy that she's only making $8,000/mo on OnlyFans. Reality is that she may have to adjust her lifestyle like hundreds of thousands if not millions of other people have.
Those are closed, restricted or its employees furloughed due to the 'rona and won't pay nearly as much as selling pictures on the internet. Patreon has the same issues and a different model - less personalized, and you get paid per creation (or per month), instead of the individual sale model that Onlyfans seems to have (based on this article). Not as much space for personalized requests either.
8k a month, but that is pre-tax, pre-healthcare, etc. Supporting a family and paying for health insurance for them is going to knock that number down real fast.
Depending on where this person lives, yes that absolutely could be scraping by. Even more so if they have a family member who needs special care, or they are paying for someone's education.
That’s 96k per year. Assuming 20k in taxes and 10k in health insurance (both very generous numbers), that’s still 66k per year. Outside of some Californian cities, 66k is more than enough to lead a comfortable life on.
Your numbers seem reasonable, but that 66k has to support N people, covering rent, food, childcare or tuition, all the equipment and clothing costs for the business, etc.
Is it enough to save for retirement? To deal with a medical emergency or sudden bill? If not, I'd feel comfortable calling that scraping by.
There are many places that would be a tight squeeze in the states.
66k doesn't typically include all the costs of operating a business, safety from people with parasocial relationships, etc. which this person has to carry.
But yes, I'd also argue that it is a much broader problem in the US.
There are a lot of families living on a lot less than that. Go to the poor area of your town sometime. Where the blacks, hispanic, and immigrants live (sadly the stereotype has a lot of truth behind it). Notice that there are a lot of kids living in the small houses with bad paint. Notice someone fixing a 15 year old car outside with just hand tools. Hope that the violence problems in those areas don't get you. In general I find such people making the best of their lot, nice people who want the best for their family. They don't have much to live on but there is enough for food (except when drugs are involved which is all too common)
It's presumably a huge amount of work. There's the work of setting up the shoot and the performance itself, then the photo editing, managing and interacting with your community constantly, marketing, dealing with the finances/bookwork, researching and buying new equipment and clothing, etc etc etc.
Just like successful twitch and YouTube channels, the behind the scenes work is hugely underestimated.
You are trivializing the work of someone without any apparent understanding of the actual labor involved.
I could easily say that typing at a computer doesn’t look like hard work and you could easily get a second job to a dev. They’d tell you that the part you see doesn’t tell the whole story.
Maybe don’t judge a person only by what you can see.
It's funny to see this people complaining about losing their cash cow.
In all honesty, Kudos to them for milking those crazy amount of money off the platform (and the people).
But in all seriousness: 1. one can't seriously believe that easy money will always be this easy and abundant 2. competition drives the prices down and fighting the stigma on sex workers drives the competition up.
I'm not being judgemental or anything, it's just that the whole argument does not make sense, at all.
And btw as soon as something stops being a subculture, people like Bella Thorne will start showing up. It's sad, but happens in every space/environment.
> 1. one can't seriously believe that easy money will always be this easy and abundant 2. competition drives the prices down and fighting the stigma on sex workers drives the competition up.
Yes, but that totally misses the point. The problem is that the pictures (presumably) weren't as advertised and so OnlyFans lowered the price ceiling for everyone to reduce future losses. The complaint isn't that people don't pay, but that the plattform stopped allowing high paid work.
And in all honesty, it is a bad way to handle the situation. Pulling posts with a high number of complaints, holding the money for a few days or only setting a limit for new accounts would've been a superior solution by far, at least in my opinion.
> And in all honesty, it is a bad way to handle the situation. Pulling posts with a high number of complaints, holding the money for a few days or only setting a limit for new accounts would've been a superior solution by far, at least in my opinion.
Right, that's my confusion too. Why not just hold creator revenue a bit longer and then make chargebacks during that period their liability?
“One can’t seriously believe that easy money will always be this way and abundant”. Idk man have you heard of the federal reserve?
Money will be easy and abundant for those at the top, and dear and capricious for the disempowered.
>1. one can't seriously believe that easy money will always be this easy and abundant
as with all black market activities, like the oldest profession, the money is always easy and abundant. It's always there. But restricting it consolidates the power away from the actual workers to an intermediary, historically this has been violent male pimps.
"Please indoctrinate yourself the same way I have."
I don't get why he's being downvoted, this is a large payout for very little work. They're not wrong and not really making a value judgement based on morals about sex.
I feel like this sort of definition doesn't serve any purpose beyond some political correctness. In the sense of the definition, I have been a sex worker (I programmed dildos once). But it doesn't feel that way at all.
Time and time again we see the danger of letting an outside entity manage things for you.
They make things easy for you but when you disagree with the way they run things you're often left sol. And the cost to exit the platform is much higher now.
With some of the numbers shown, I'm amazed they're still using a party that takes 20% of their innings instead of hiring a web company to set up their own site. I wonder if they're trapped in exclusivity contracts (and get thrown out if they fire up their own site), or just afraid of losing followers if they migrate away from onlyfans.
20% is very reasonable when you realise that they aren't just handling payment processing, they're providing access to payment processors that ordinarily ban that type of content. You're welcome to go and set up a site using Stripe or something similar, but it won't be long before you're banned for violating their ToS because they won't allow porn.
> I'm amazed they're still using a party that takes 20% of their innings instead of hiring a web company to set up their own site.
Setting up and maintaining your own site isn't cheap either, and you still need a payment processor. Most of those don't allow adult content, and for the ones that do, 20% is pretty standard.
Hiring a web company to set up your own site takes up front cash. Having a web host that can serve video and images is an ongoing cost. And those costs grow as your userbase does.
OnlyFans only requires you to sign up.
You could ask why people on YouTube don't hire web companies to set up their own site.
Not being a fan I don’t know for sure, but I imagine having a platform where you have “choice” is probably a sticky feature of the site. Kinda like you’d rather shop Amazon than shop at a hundred different indiv stores.
OnlyFans is doing most of the sales and marketing work here, which is 99% of the value (nude pictures of hot "models" are a commodity). Charging only 20% seems like a steal.
Actually, onlyfans does almost zero marketing work. There is almost no discovery on the site. The only ones making any substantial money are those with a built-in audience from other platforms.
When I was younger, I supported full legalisation of sex work because I thought that to disallow it would be to remove the agency of sex workers who had chosen that path as their profession.
Then I got older and read accounts of sex workers trafficked to European countries where prostitution is legal I realised that some (but not all) sex workers are actually participating in "legal" transactions under duress. In my mind that invalidates the necessary consent required when the activity involves sex work of some kind, making it unethical from the buyer to acquire such a service despite it being legal locally. While trafficking is of course still illegal, I am unclear about the laws protecting trafficking victims from their "buyers" in non-consenting transactions.
Since it is practically impossible to confirm if a given sex worker is participating under duress or not, especially when it occurs "remotely" as in this OnlyFans situation, I would say it is always unethical to purchase such services.
In addition, what I would consider "under duress" is fairly broad, not only under threat of violence from traffickers, but also including economic duress where an individual feels that it is the only way to earn an income to put food on the table. In this vein, I would consider sex tourism to poorer countries a form of exploitation and thus unethical, even though one could argue the individuals from the poorer countries selling such services do so "willingly".
This article writes that one of these women feels that she must engage in sex work through OnlyFans because it is "the only way she can support her family...". It leaves a bad taste as I would not consider that she is participating in the transaction without duress, and thus actually consenting in the transaction. Would you be okay with it if you knew that the woman you were buying lingerie pictures "had" to do it? How would that not be a form of exploitation?
However, one can extend this argument to any type of work. "She says her _____ work is the only way she can support her family...", replace with an arbitrary line of work and activity (woodcutting/marketing/basketweaving). Is there any thing that makes sex work special (apart from some puritanical opinion which are not actually applicable), that would make such a transaction inherently more unethical than say being forced to work at McDonalds because it's the only way to make ends meet? Why would the latter more "ethical" than the former, when an individual is still "forced" to sell their labor to survive, what ever form that labor is?
> also including economic duress where an individual feels that it is the only way to earn an income to put food on the table
Doesn't that mean pretty much all labor then?
I think my biggest counter argument to your otherwise excellent post is that I am not convinced that prohibition actually fixes the problem you're talking about. We all agree that alcoholism is bad, but making it illegal didn't actually do anything to stop it.
> Since it is practically impossible to confirm if a given sex worker is participating under duress or not, especially when it occurs "remotely" as in this OnlyFans situation, I would say it is always unethical to purchase such services.
Applying this kind of blanket rule leads to all sorts of ridiculous conclusions. Can you verify that the people assembling the very device you wrote this post on aren't under similar amounts of duress as you clutch your pearls over in this comment?
This really highlights the underlying problem. People don't have an unhealthy attachment to sex. Who cares if Chinese children are being over worked and under paid to make your iPhone, but God forbid there be even one sex worker who is possibly working in unethical conditions. Let's just kill the entire platform and livelihoods of every other sex worker!
I feel like the comment you responded to acknowledges all sides of the argument. How is being coerced to work at McDonalds worse than being forced to sell nude pics, other than the puritanical sensibility?
I must have misunderstood you. What's the point you are making here?
> Since it is practically impossible to confirm if a given sex worker is participating under duress or not, especially when it occurs "remotely" as in this OnlyFans situation, I would say it is always unethical to purchase such services
I agree that ethics and law do not coincide in all circumstances, and sometimes what is lawful may not necessarily be ethical. However, in the situation you described, prudence is what you should aim at, and understanding where and how trafficking can arise in your area or community should be your priority. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater by demonizing sex work entirely because of its susceptibility to trafficking is not only extreme, but risks sacrificing people's freedom to choose their work based on events that they cannot possibly control.
This topic is much more complex than that, but that's one side of it at least.
The last paragraph brushes up to the problem but doesn't quite get there. Truth is that ethics are only useful in certain times and places. If you try to generalize them to encompass everything, you start reaching ridiculous conclusions.
The outrage at Bella Thorne seems misguided... After all, she did not change the policies, only fans did. Did her actions increase only fans timelines for these changes? Maybe. But at the end of the day, I don't think that justifies the outrage Bella Thorne is receiving over this. Am I missing some action that she took that should justify the outrage: for instance, Bella meeting with only fans to demand that the maximum allowed tip be reduced?
But some reports say OnlyFans has been planning these changes for some time - and by rolling them out now, they can make Bella Thorne take the heat instead of taking it themselves.
After my first review of this situation, I agreed with your assessment but apparently she has not been very pro sex-worker while building off of the services that they have grown. It's still very difficult to find good info on this situation, because its all twitter and insta posts without a good paper trail.
I too have been having issues with finding good info on this situation. Hopefully something will come to light that provides a little more explanation as to the anger directed at Bella. :shrug: I would not be surprised if this is just being blown up in the media because it involves sex workers which is sure to peak readers interest.
Looking at Twitter, a lot of them are angry with her because she has actually be able to have a dialogue with OnlyFans and they have been unable to get anything more than canned messages.
The fallout from this is not unexpected, and neither is the Schadenfreude from it.
Many people massively underestimate the effects of tech voyeurism. Even relatively tame fans can be frighteningly deep in delusions of having a connection with someone who they have little to no interaction with.
I encourage anyone perplexed by how Bella supports herself when there is no scarcity on the Internet to pornography to check out Twitch's Just Chatting category. Find a thumb of an attractive woman and click into her stream.
You will find many viewers who act as though they have a personal relationship with a streamer. People respond in chat as though they are having a conversation with the streamer. People donate (sometimes $10+) just to have their message read on stream.
Most disconcerting, you will find a non-negligible amount of people who are watching the stream + insulting the streamer in chat. These are people taking time out of their day to participate in targeted, anonymous hate.
I think it's pretty clear you should feel sad for the guy, who is obviously, I try to say without cruelty, pathetic and misled. It's like people who are very dumb falling for obvious scams - e.g. send me your money and I'll double it.
I don't mean that everyone watching these streamers is like this guy, but some portion of them, probably a higher percentage of the donating "whales", likely think that they somehow do have some kind of chance or relationship with the steamer. These people, it seems to me, are essentially exploited for profit.
I realize it's not the same as a scam. Not the same exactly - because the streamer never says or suggests she'll be your girlfriend for X dollars or something, but knowingly or unknowingly the streamer is creating that suggestion for some and profiting off of it.
It strikes me as a really complicated moral issue, because some people do seem exploited by it, others like it, and the streamers benefit by it. I don't know what to think about the enterprise, but I think it's at least clear we can feel bad for that guy, even recognizing that he's being a jerk.
>These people, it seems to me, are essentially exploited for profit.
This has always been true of the online sex worker/camgirl/streamer world. There have always been some that feel that way and are emotionally led on by the actress, who knows exactly what's going on. It moved into Kik and then Snapchat, Twitch, and OnlyFans. There are also some that will profit off of manipulating emotionally questionable viewers and then calling them a simp when they're out with their own friends. It's kind of a vicious world.
This will also be going on with the next big thing too. And the one after that. I worry that it's actually causing MGTOW and intel culture to grow more widespread.
It's a good point that just as the actress bears some moral responsibility for exploiting the pathetic, the company bears responsibility for that too. Maybe easier to justify if you work for kik, but OnlyFans seems like it has a higher ratio of exploitation to non-exploitation than kik.
No reason you can't be sad for both. When you make money based on having a cultivated persona it benefits you to allow people to sink themselves as deep into your fandom as possible. You don't even have to be particularly active or purposeful about it. You just respond to your audience in whatever way gets you the best reaction and the most money, and like many other industries like gambling and mobile gaming you create dolphins and whales who will embrace a worldview where it's worth it to give you hundreds or thousands of dollars. The difference is that when the illusion is shattered the mobile gamer who wasted ten grand on Candy Crush can't send the CEO of King Digital Entertainment a private message telling him to go to hell.
There's no motivation for anyone to protect people. Twitch has no reason to stop viewers from devoting their time and money to a personal fandom and neither do the streamers.
One can either look at this superficially and just laugh at the guy, or can read deeper into it and realize that maybe the Internet isn't as great as we thought (personally I think it's been a net negative for society and humanity as a whole -- unlocking revenue for businesses isn't a positive in my eyes). There's now a whole generation of (mainly) men under ~35 who have been disenfranchised and are almost completely disconnected from their own reality. The Internet is their only conduit.
Those men are very real, but it's not obvious to me that the Internet is the cause or even exacerbating the issue. There are desperately lonely men in subcultures that don't heavily use the Internet too - they just end up doing drugs or crimes, which is worse for everyone involved.
I think this is different than the usual case of lonely men. The interactions that take place on these platforms can create the illusion that a person is in a relationship with the content producer. It's similar to the illusory relationships some people have with celebrities but it's much stronger due to the interactivity. It's much more dangerous than a lot of things, though perhaps not as dangerous as hard drugs or crime.
And just because someone is engaging in this kind of activity online rather than going out and committing crime does not we as a society should encourage it. In all likelihood, we may see some of these men have mental breakdowns due to disillusionment and then they can become extremely dangerous. It's these disillusioned, lonely men who are highly vulnerable to joining the incel movement and potentially committing terrorist attacks.
The internet and social media as a whole, and technology as a whole, has made our society less social. The screens are more compelling than what's off screen. People are holed up with their screens.
We are unhealthy and have unhealthy views of each other, what happiness is, what beauty is, what success looks like.
I think this is largely due to the fact that all the existing and thriving (post)modern social-network-as-businesses start off with cost structures that restrict themselves to serve the advertisers and medium/large businesses in a long run, and not the end users.
This reflects:
- the chasm between paid-to-use and free-to-use services in terms of frictions introduced during user on-boarding.
- the hyped-up vc eco-system that pour insane amount of cash into internet products that display crazy growth curve and that helps to destroy competitors to achieve maximum market coverage - so everyone wants crazy growth curve.
And the result is that existing social-network-as-businesses whose services majority of the human population use are simply not designed to serve the people.
Screens are more compelling than what's off screen only when what's off screen are less compelling than screens.
I want to believe that people learn.
And I want to believe that we as a civilisation are gradually shifting towards a reward system where wealth is accumulated by those who contribute to helping others to learn things (e.g. StackOverflow and Coursera just received another round of funding recently! So that's super cool!), and, on a long run, humanity's collective progress to enlightenment.
This is why seeing recent advancements in psychedelic and consciousness research (e.g. by John Hopkins, Imperial) always brighten my day =)
And I'm just super happy and grateful that great thinkers on consciousness (like John Yates, Roger Penrose, Joscha Bach) are getting a lot more media exposure in recent years! (And this is all thanks to the internet & new media!)
So cheer up mate! Always look on the bright side of life! (as much as possible, while appreciating the intricacies and emptiness within)
ok but they DO have a conversation with the streamer, no? That's not shocking, maybe unfamiliar to some, but reasonable. it's the extent of delusion that matters i guess.
Online or offline hate is part and parcel of any public performance, be it jesus on the streets of jerusalem or a girl on twitch. There is really no way to have one without the other unless you remove the communication channel.
Viewers (the subject) actually believe they have a relationship with the object (be they a pro gamer or scantily-clad model). To most well-adjusted folks with a healthy social circle, this seems kind of nuts, but parasocial relationships have a long and sordid history -- starting with the invention of the "fireside chat" on radio. Loneliness is a powerful motivator and the psychology here is profoundly interesting. At the end of the day, I'd say places like Onlyfans end up being net negatives for both the models as well as the fans. It's a bit sick that the internet -- the very thing which was supposed to bring people together -- ends up cannibalizing its own.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djMojvschs0
[1] https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20...