Why are we accepting that a payment transaction company that is part of a duopoly with visa gets to define itself as the moral arbiter of legal business.
Because for the most part this situation has been only weaponized against those who are out of ideological compliance with the tech industry. As long as it is a tool for punishing what a small geographical area considers wrong-think, it will go on with the blessing of Bay Area tech scene. With OnlyFans there's some uneasiness because suddenly those who have been cheering on the use of this weapon are starting to realize it might expand into areas that could harm them.
Kind of ironic how Jack has been all about Twitter's new decentralized (“Blue Sky”) effort, whilst Twitter under his leadership has followed the path of the worst-behaving centralized services (locking down APIs[1], these nag screens, paywalling dumb features with no option to remove ads/tracking, turning verification from a security feature into a popularity contest).
[1] I remember some of this happening before Jack's return, but still.
blocking Twitter cookies solved the issue, in Opera. But this user hostile / dark pattern is going to get worse with time for people who do not want to browser Twitter with a Twitter account. Ironically, Twitter will automatically ban the brand new user from doing almost anything on their website if they refuse to give their phone number to Twitter.
Hmm not true for me, in Switzerland, latest Firefox, never had any Twitter account nor anybody else around me. There is just small box with login on the upper right side of the page which can be easily ignored.
They're not banning sex workers, they're just banning sexually explicit content. So you'll be paying on OnlyFans and getting "the goods" via a WhatsApp/FaceTime video call.
I am curious. Why does this news around OnlyFans strike a nerve with HN crowd? I hadn't heard about OnlyFans before this news exploded. Is OF known for their tech capabilities?
Like somebody mentioned, companies trying to impose on people what their morals should be. The first time I heard about it was when a nurse/doctor got fired. Although some restrictions can be consider, what people do in their private life should not be anybody’s business unless it affects others.
because they moved the porn industry to the digital era, the same way that things moved from tv to youtube. there are no porn studios in OF but individual performers and this is a "disruption". Of course nobody knows if this will work for other types of content, but at least it worked for porn.
OF pulled what youtube and google do when they "demonetize" people they don't like. It's generally a downgrade from an open market to one where there is not even the possibility to be in a low-volume nice.
It's a pretty trivial CRUD app, if you want to be dismissive about the actual tech involved, but if you've read any of the discussion, you'd see that the tech largely isn't what's being discussed here. (And I'll bet the tech stack that powers FB messenger or Snapchat is endlessly fascinating, but you could similarly derisively call those CRUD apps.)
OF is fun to talk about because, well, it's porn. But looking past the empowerment of mostly young women (top earners make O($100,000/month)), OF is of particular interesting to the HN crowd because it exposes a lie: digital money is not the same as physical cash. Having a gatekeeper say what you're allowed to spend your money on, is antithical to freedom. Whiiiiiiiich leads to cryptocurrency, which many a reader here finds interesting.
The other theory that was previously being floated about was FOSTA-SESTA laws, which purports to be against sex trafficking, but ends up hurting the very group it says it's against, sex workers. Those laws are what closed down Craigslist personals and Backpages, for better or worse. (Which, according to sex workers, worse, since it has lead to sex workers being killed.) But see this is also of interest to HN readers because those bad laws mean a founder-CEO could face jail time if the police believes their MVP app/website promotes sex work in a primary way.
Right now they are putting a multi billion revenue line at risk. I would have absorb the volatility in their case, or pass it onto their content producers.
They aren’t actually banning nudity or even “porn” they are restricting explicit content for free and unverified accounts and putting some additional restriction on the type of content that can be posted.
If the majority of the revenue is generated by cosplayers who show some boobs and bush and girls in borderline transparent bikinis selling bath water they might be alright.
Crypto isn’t a solution really if they go that route their revenue would drop like a rock.
If their biggest cash cows don’t do hardcore stuff or their fan base would be ok with the content under the new policy I think they’ll survive.
> Consumers spent $6bn on Onyfans last year. If the payment industry won't or can't support that, this is another arbitrage opportunity, like it or not. Is there a payment tech that doesn't have centralised gatekeepers, and uses a bearer model to address fraud?
I think the arbitrage opportunity isn’t nearly as large as people imagine. Payment processors aren’t run by ideological zealots who refuse certain transactions on moral grounds. On the contrary, they are ruthless capitalists who’d love to get a slice of any and every multibillion dollar market under the sun.
I’m sure actuaries at MasterCard ran the numbers and found that the risk of accepting payments for live adult content (e.g. high level of chargebacks, extreme legal consequences for processing payments for blatantly illegal material, e.g. child pornography, that’s hard to filter out owing to the transient nature of live streams) far outweighed the benefits. And if you’ll excuse my appeal to authority, I assume those actuaries are correct, given the amount of money such a profit-focused company is walking away from.
I imagine OnlyFans can survive and thrive by switching their payment methods away from credit cards to fully private Monero or even create their own token. Also by moving their servers to a jurisdiction less oppressive than the Democratic Republic of America.
You still need to convert between a token and money, until you can use your Coinlyfans to buy food at your local grocer and pay rent it doesn’t actually help.
Current cryptos are too slow to process and have too many onboarding steps many of which are also quite slow and require more involved from the customer which increases drop outs.
You can’t buy crypto with a credit card easily, even on the big exchanges and you have to go through a KYC process and then use debit or bank transfer usually.
Also Onlyfans is a British startup I’m not even sure it’s hosted in the US.
Most people already have a credit card or a bank card.
Also at least in the UK I can open a bank account with a utility bill to get a crypto account on any major exchange I need to upload a photo ID usually a passport as well as a proof of address.
Then I need to make a bank transfer and even then the account is still usually limited till some arbitrary time frame has passed or number of transactions have occurred.
Transferring crypto is still much slower than using a card. Get the address / scan the QR code, log into your exchange, do the transfer and then wait until X number of confirmation has passed which can take 20-30 or even more minutes.
This is antithetical to an impulse buy which quite likely how most of the people that pay for Onlyfans and other porn sites get hooked in the first place.
Current options include distributed exchanges or purchase mainstream cryptos at a convenience shop, etc. Also kyc exchanges work to serve merely as gateway to a private wallet and true anonymous coins.
Work in progress on more convenient options. And of course buyer beware - if you ask the state to be a nanny you get a nanny state. OnlyFans is private cryptos' killer feature. It's actually MasterCard that's putting itself out of business.
Onlyfans is quite likely fueled by impulse buys if it takes more than 10 seconds to pay many people would reconsider. If it takes a trip to some shady convenient store at 2am to put your debit card into some shady looking ATM and then transfer it into a wallet manually no one is going to do that.
Onlyfans is really not a private cryptos anything. It’s $6b per year, the yearly purchase rate of Mastercards network is about $1.5 trillion.
It is not going put MasterCard out of business just like PornHub didn’t.
This seems to be a usecase for a fast scalable crypto. Note: it’s not the only contender. And it doesn’t need to be decentralized. I am purely talking from a pragmatic perspective.
I find it fascinating that people get into fights over this, just as they did when payment processors forced the deplatforming of conservative political commentators as if it wasn’t the different sides of the same coin. Not only that but people also celebrate it as a sort of victory for their side. Which is why I find it sad that in the end everyone loses and the Internet becomes a bit less free every day.
> Seth Eisen, a spokesman for Mastercard, told CNN Business it was not involved in OnlyFans' decision to restrict the content it would allow on the platform. "It's a decision they came to themselves," Eisen said
58 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadSome changes, like them or not, come from very unexpected places.
[0] https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/29334498/ncaa...
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/mississippi-lawmakers-vote-remove-...
[1] I remember some of this happening before Jack's return, but still.
This alone tells me that this seems like a bad idea.
OF pulled what youtube and google do when they "demonetize" people they don't like. It's generally a downgrade from an open market to one where there is not even the possibility to be in a low-volume nice.
I learned about OnlyFans from here, months ago.
OF is fun to talk about because, well, it's porn. But looking past the empowerment of mostly young women (top earners make O($100,000/month)), OF is of particular interesting to the HN crowd because it exposes a lie: digital money is not the same as physical cash. Having a gatekeeper say what you're allowed to spend your money on, is antithical to freedom. Whiiiiiiiich leads to cryptocurrency, which many a reader here finds interesting.
The other theory that was previously being floated about was FOSTA-SESTA laws, which purports to be against sex trafficking, but ends up hurting the very group it says it's against, sex workers. Those laws are what closed down Craigslist personals and Backpages, for better or worse. (Which, according to sex workers, worse, since it has lead to sex workers being killed.) But see this is also of interest to HN readers because those bad laws mean a founder-CEO could face jail time if the police believes their MVP app/website promotes sex work in a primary way.
And as much crap as crypto gets for its usability, this seems to be a legit opportunity for some cryptocurrency or service to shine through.
(With that said - what's stopping banks from refusing to offer their services to crypto brokers?)
If the majority of the revenue is generated by cosplayers who show some boobs and bush and girls in borderline transparent bikinis selling bath water they might be alright.
Crypto isn’t a solution really if they go that route their revenue would drop like a rock.
If their biggest cash cows don’t do hardcore stuff or their fan base would be ok with the content under the new policy I think they’ll survive.
https://twitter.com/OnIyFlans/status/1428483692834566145
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1428737349979095040...
I’m sure actuaries at MasterCard ran the numbers and found that the risk of accepting payments for live adult content (e.g. high level of chargebacks, extreme legal consequences for processing payments for blatantly illegal material, e.g. child pornography, that’s hard to filter out owing to the transient nature of live streams) far outweighed the benefits. And if you’ll excuse my appeal to authority, I assume those actuaries are correct, given the amount of money such a profit-focused company is walking away from.
Current cryptos are too slow to process and have too many onboarding steps many of which are also quite slow and require more involved from the customer which increases drop outs.
You can’t buy crypto with a credit card easily, even on the big exchanges and you have to go through a KYC process and then use debit or bank transfer usually.
Also Onlyfans is a British startup I’m not even sure it’s hosted in the US.
Also at least in the UK I can open a bank account with a utility bill to get a crypto account on any major exchange I need to upload a photo ID usually a passport as well as a proof of address.
Then I need to make a bank transfer and even then the account is still usually limited till some arbitrary time frame has passed or number of transactions have occurred.
Transferring crypto is still much slower than using a card. Get the address / scan the QR code, log into your exchange, do the transfer and then wait until X number of confirmation has passed which can take 20-30 or even more minutes.
This is antithetical to an impulse buy which quite likely how most of the people that pay for Onlyfans and other porn sites get hooked in the first place.
Onlyfans is really not a private cryptos anything. It’s $6b per year, the yearly purchase rate of Mastercards network is about $1.5 trillion.
It is not going put MasterCard out of business just like PornHub didn’t.
It's a UK-based company.
Payment providers need to be classed as utilities and required to serve any legal business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245221
A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245221 - Aug 2021 (411 comments)
Previously:
OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274 - Aug 2021 (1306 comments)
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/20/tech/onlyfans-explicit-conten...
> Seth Eisen, a spokesman for Mastercard, told CNN Business it was not involved in OnlyFans' decision to restrict the content it would allow on the platform. "It's a decision they came to themselves," Eisen said