site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27030 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As a little bit of a palate cleanser for the Annunciation shooting and Scotland All Female Braveheart Remake children-with-knives fracas, I thought we could talk about the financial state of internet whoredom:

Matthew Ball Xwitter Thread on OnlyFans Financials

(Mod question: If linking to a Xwitter thread, are there any standard operating procedures considering some people don't have it?)

Big 3 Takeaways:

  • Subscription revenue is down, but transactional revenue is up 95%. This means that OF "creators" are making their money, now, on actually bartering pseduo-social-sexual relationships with buyers. You can't just blast out nudes and collect rent, you have to engage with the audience. This, to me, seems like an actually defensible moat vis-a-vis AI OF alternatives.
  • Gross creator revenue surpasses the total league payroll of ALL SPORTS LEAGUES EXCEPT THE NFL. Culture War angle: The market value of female sexuality is greater than everything except the most intensively financialized male performance sport.
  • One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as the highest paid pro athletes, the managers of the largest hedge funds, banks, and private equity firms. The only people out earning her are founder-shareholders of giant public behemoths (Zuckerburg etc.) and this is through wealth appreciation rather than "straight cash homie!" income.

What actually got me to take the time to write this up was seeing this article on sports betting.

Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration. That these all disproportionately impact (there, I said it!) young males is all the more revealing -- society is still okay with disposing the disposables and is now more than happy to turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

Copy and paste the content of the whateverthefuckitscalled thread as a quote.

It's difficult to comment on OF economics without any obvious subjects for comparison.

Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration.

You're leaving out the fourth horseman.

Video games. Digital irreality in general, really, but you're talking about young men, who live life in the subjunctive by gaming. For women it's social media instead of video games, debt instead of gambling, different kinds of porn(and sex toys), gold digger feminism, SSRI's, furbabies. For men it's weed(or more appropriately, hashish- THC contents in the current stuff far exceed what natural plants would give.), porn, sportsbetting, videogames, crypto and gig work.

Video games.

out side of video games that are actually just gambling. I really don't think they are in the same ball bark. I have to many friends that work out, have families. and play games with the boys often. if you recently watched the podcast where talyor swift announced her new album there is an off comment about that when she got her music back Travice was in the other room playing video games with his friends.. you can't tell me that would be as bad as saying travice was "Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana"

Gross creator revenue surpasses the total league payroll of ALL SPORTS LEAGUES EXCEPT THE NFL.

This is more specific than expected. Because by looking up total revenues for sports leagues, at least the NFL, NBA, and MLB brought in more than OF in 2024. (NHL is less, so "hockey is more boring than porn".) Why are we comparing payroll instead of gross revenue?

How much money laundering is being done thru Onlyfans?

I feel like I'd be really good at money laundering. The part that seems hard is the millions of ill gotten gains that I need to wash in the first place.

Am I doing something wrong that I don't have access to millions in ill gotten gains??

Mind that to be "really good" at money laundering you need to be able to convert $100 of dirty money into at least $80-85 of pretax clean money. Anyone who is fine with taking a 20% haircut to turn their dirty money into clean money can already wash approximately infinity dollars via secondary gift card markets.

A fun corollary of that is that if you run an online marketplace which matches buyers and sellers while taking a cut, you will run into issues if your cut drops below the best ratio scalably achievable elsewhere. It's one of those "you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your slowest friend" things.

Genuinely most people here trying to point the finger of money laundering have no idea what it means or how it works

I just looked it up in the dictionary. It means "To conceal the source of money as by channeling it through an intermediary".

Just like Superman 3!

society is still okay with disposing the disposables and is now more than happy to turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

Any values set has pathologies - ways in which dysfunctions manifest, and negative outcomes it is willing to tolerate. To take the Annunciation schooting topic you allude to: American gun rights advocates are generally willing to tolerate elevated homicide and suicide rates as well as semi-regular mass shootings as a cost of protecting civilian gun ownership. I don't think it's right to say they're more than happy with those outcomes.

It's true that we are collectively not as sensitive to certain kinds of dysfunction among young men, but it's also true that these problems are largely seen as an expression of genuine preference and thus None of Your Business. A heroin addict might thank you after the fact for forcing him through rehab (though he certainly won't during); a young man is significantly less likely to feel the same way if you confiscate his weed, porn, and gambling. The US has generally accepted the idea that certain kinds of anti-social business model are acceptable as long as the participants know what they're getting into (for small values of 'know what they're getting into'). It's your God-given right to blow all your money on drugs, strippers, and gambling, and fuck anyone telling you you can't.

What strikes me about this phenomenon is that both sides of the argument broadly come from the Right: social conservatives decry the public toleration of vice and masculinists object to what they see as the exploitation and neglect of young men, while business conservatives adamantly oppose anything that would curtail their ability to fleece the peasants.

Gross creator revenue surpasses the total league payroll of ALL SPORTS LEAGUES EXCEPT THE NFL.

Yes but there’s 2 million OnlyFans content creators and about 600 pro basketball players. The combined total salary of every minimum wage fast food employee in America far outstrips NFL salaries too, but that’s just because there’s so many more fry cooks than pro football players.

It might be a bit more fair to include minor league and semi-pro teams, but the number is probably still small unless you somehow counted college (and maybe high school) athletes. That would also bump the revenue to compare with somewhat.

Pro sports salaries are, like OF revenue, very unevenly distributed.

AFAIK minor league baseball players do get paid, but in other sports you either make it into the pros or you fund your hobby by coaching with no in between.

Out of curiosity:

Triple-A players earning the most, around $35,800 annually in 2024, while Rookie-level players earn less, approximately $19,800.

Ouch. Very unevenly distributed indeed. The lower end is just over full time federal minimum wage and way under my state's minimum wage.

It's not great, though as I understand it it's better than it sounds because the organization picks up a lot of your living expenses.

I know someone whose husband bounced between the minors and majors for a few years and it was brutal. It was essentially a full time hobby where she was having to support both of them. And he spent most of their first couple years of marriage on the road in shitty motels while she was at school/working. It was only sustainable because they knew he only had a few years in him and had a degree to fall back on once they actually wanted to buy a house and have kids. She was willing to accept a few years of him chasing his dream, but only because they both knew it wouldn't be long term.

Which specific leagues do you mean? "The majors" in baseball means MLB, full stop (it's right in the name!), and that is decidedly not the lifestyle you're describing. Even a guy who's only in the majors for about two weeks a season and playing minor pro the rest of the time, making league minimum in the majors but not necessarily the minors, would pull down north of $100,000 a season (nearly half of it for the stints in the majors), plus a lot of all-expenses-paid travel involving good hotels and catering. So I assume you must mean something different from what you said.

Another takeaway: US is ~60% of OF spending, when we're generally 30% of global spending power. So one of the right's memes, namely that a bunch of Indians and Africans are driving sexual degeneracy, doesn't apply here at least. It's driven by Americans.

I can't believe Sophie Rain pulled down $80m. She's hot, but (IMO) only a 9/10, and a bunch of lame softcore cannot possibly be worth that for any number of people.

I consume porn, unfortunately, and so the whales on OF with multiple subscriptions blow my mind. How can these people consume so much? And why are they paying for it? For people with mental disabilities who can "believe" these sorts of parasocial relationships, I can understand. But for anyone with a normal level of EQ and general cognition, it just doesn't compute to me.

Even if it's nominally global it's still an American site targeting an American audience. For example they advertise more heavily to American customers and likely don't have the local payment methods more popular in countries like India.

A subset of people in every country will have credit cards but average people might not.

OF is actually a British site, though this is an easy mistake to make since the UK does not otherwise have big internet startups, and is instead known for cracking down on internet porn.

I am not surprised that Americans are 60% of the market, Americans are much richer and OF is a global market without price discrimination. Even if Indians and Africans are willing to spend double the percentage of total resources on OF they will still be much lower as a total amount just because they have so much less.

Great point re: price discrimination.

addiction level of marijuana use

If we could 1:1 swap every alcoholic for a marijuana addict, would that be better? I find weed a little more distasteful for some reason but it's hard for me to see it as more harmful than alcohol.

Talk to (literally- no, I am not misusing figuratively)any blue collar boss. Ask if he'd rather an alcoholic or a pot user for a new lower level hire. 100%(I am not exaggerating) will choose the alcoholic.

Talk to any cop- all of them will tell you, marijuana is a bad drug, alcoholics can continue to be functional but potheads? No way.

Pot also has mental health consequences absent from alcohol, particularly for teens.

Talk to (literally- no, I am not misusing figuratively)any blue collar boss.

I've literally been a blue collar boss, and found the opposite to be true -- construction trades are literally full of guys smoking up in the truck on breaks, and it doesn't have the same impact on them as it would on you or I; tolerance or individual brain chemistry? Don't know, don't care.

Some level of alcoholism is also tolerated, but anyone I've seen who gets too far into the day-drinking has been more trouble than he's worth -- honestly I think that 90% of the current OH&S BS stems from a desire to make the jobsite safe enough that you can't hurt yourself even if you're hammered. (doesn't really work; true alcoholics always find a way to be a better idiot)

alcoholics can continue to be functional but potheads? No way.

What?!?!? This is silly

There are very few non-functional alcoholics or potheads.

Also on the scale of shitty behaviors alcoholics have worse outcomes for others and health outcomes for themselves.

I also doubt police opinions on weed smokers is anything more than "I don't care" given the actual drug users they have to interact with. But you're also American so you folk still have ridiculous takes on weed.

I am not blatantly pro weed either, I'm very against teenagers having access to cheap distillate weed pens, etc

While I think OP is overstating the case I find that the majority of people underestimate how bad the weed crisis is, it's not that the majority of people have a bad outcome but culturally it has no immune system, many many people abuse it to an absurd extent and some of the problems (like addiction, hyper-emesis, psychosis) are super under estimated.

The people in society who we are always complaining about are all abusing weed. it might not be the cause of the problems but it is contributory.

I took a visiting friend to a weed store near my house the other day and he stocked up on some products. The store sold weed buds, like straight from the plant, but he bought gummies and a vape pen and a super concentrated weed juice cartridge to slide in.

I took a puff from the vape pen for about 1 whole second and immediately started coughing and then spent the night being fairly dumb and unable to follow conversations and also a bit paranoid over how dumb I was.

I was expecting a very light buzz, not to check out. Stuff is so potent now and it's quite cheap. I'm fairly experienced with drugs but this caught me by surprise.

Incidentally, this weed store near my house is a nuisance because it's like a beacon for strung out people to congregate by in the early morning while they wait for the store to open so they can self-medicate. Which would be fine if they kept to themselves but they shout all morning and wake up the people that live across the street.

The penjamin is insane

The lack of friction when you own one for going sober>high is insane

It is profoundly easy to smuggle them in anywhere and then get high anywhere

The potency, is insane

Ironically, one of my favorite things about them is if you're very delicate, you can take tiny hits and "surf" a mild high, which is really pleasant. But eventually you'll fuck up, take too big of a hit, and go non-verbal lol.

I'm so happy these didn't exist when I was in high school

Yes, I am pretty worried about our youth. We might have to check out of society and join a Christian commune or something.

I was expecting a very light buzz, not to check out. Stuff is so potent now and it's quite cheap. I'm fairly experienced with drugs but this caught me by surprise.

Just musing: is this a success for capitalism, in the way that the drive for efficiency and efficacy produced aspirin from willow bark? Or a failure, because the new enhanced product isn't actually what the majority of potential customers want, and may taint the old product? Now that the production process for cocaine is known, nobody gets to buy coca leaves to chew for their mild buzz.

nobody gets to buy coca leaves to chew for their mild buzz.

Only tangentially related, but in South America people still chew coca leaves as a home remedy for altitude sickness.

I guess it's a win for capitalism because the people that were spending $1000/month on weed ten years ago can get by spending significantly less now?

Re: coca leaves, on a distantly related note I was at some sweat lodge recently and some guy offered people a puff from his home grown tobacco (in his hand carved pipe, of course) and the uptake was like 5 out of 6 people. I'm very certain if he had handed out a pack of Marlboros he would have had 0 takers.

So... maybe chewing coca leaves has room to come back too?

Depending where you are, legal weed might not be any cheaper than it was under prohibition. Every state has its own idiosyncratic system placing artificial constraints on production, pricing, and availability. Where I live the prices are more or less the same as they were in the decade before legalization, and had been at that point since the late 90s. Overall quality has gone up in general, and the higher quality illegal cannabis in the past did cost more at times, but that was largely driven by wealthy consumers driving the price up to capture the limited supply. States are still artificially constraining supply through various licensing/acreage/plant # limits on growers, but prices are also controlled in many states so wealthy consumers can't really wipe out the market for high end like they did in the past. Now the dispensary just runs out of product pretty regularly. Cannabis is a very hardy, easy to grow plant. Its resistant to disease and drought. Processing the dried flower is also fairly simple and low overhead; even the various extractions and tinctures that power the wax/oil products and edibles are generally faster and easier than the process for other crops like tobacco. Without the states limiting production the various markets could be easily flooded. Its also quite easy for individuals to grow it themselves; its literally a weed.

On the subject of strength, you can get weaker products. I know because I prefer them. Since the cancer I've lost all of my tolerances for everything; I can't even consume alcohol in any amount anymore. The main problem is that potency information isn't always clearly labeled, is often inaccurate, and the weak stuff isn't as popular so there are fewer offerings. Its there though. You can also do what I do and slice the gummies with a razor into 10ths.

and then spent the night being fairly dumb and unable to follow conversations

I've never experienced the paranoia but 'being unable to follow simple instructions or participate in conversations that required concerted thought' was interesting to me. I spent the next few days somewhat disoriented and clumsy, but at the same time less worried about things that would normally bother me.

It did feel pleasant (I hurt myself and didn't really feel it, so the anti-pain effect works in a way it doesn't entirely for alcohol) though it also took a few days to get back to normal. I'm sure if I took the time to acclimatize I could handle it but unless I have a week free it's not something I'm going to really be able to play with (and even then, I still have places to go, and driving becomes actively difficult under these circumstances).

With alcohol, the physical effects are more pronounced (and are more generally entertaining, though I get this depends on the crowd) and more importantly, they very clearly expire. Weed does not; though I have the freedom to do it, I cannot take advantage of it.

Yeah old heads will tell you the new shit is dangerous - which it is, permanent psychosis induced by marijuana is much more on the table now and while it's hard to assess is starting to seem "common."

Now that's in the under 3% of the population range for the more serious cases which is deleterious when we are talking deranged homeless people but not 100% something people will notice. What gets iffier is the "failure to launch" type problem you frequently see. I gotta imagine black Americans would do a lot better if you made all the weed disappear for instance.

But you're also American so you folk still have ridiculous takes on weed.

My vibe is Europe struggles more with alcoholism and public drunken disorder since drinking is so much more normalized.

Just from a sanitation perspective there were so many more drunken buffoons peeing on the streets around me compared to the US, including women.

I could see that tempering attitudes a bit as well.

San Francisco streetshitters notwithstanding, I suspect America is far ahead of the rest of the Anglosphere in terms of disorderly conduct by regular taxpaying individuals. I've known Australians, educated women, with college degrees, holding down jobs, just piss freely in an alley rather than find a bathroom. It's insane.

Depends on how you define ‘regular tax paying’. There’s definitely a social class which works and also just pees in an alley.

That social class typically does not hold college degrees.

That could simply be a particular American hangup about public urination. It shocks my tiny European mind when I see guys in the US getting literally arrested and charged for pissing in an alleyway, as if that is an actual crime. Similar to jaywalking, I suppose.

It shocks my tiny European mind when I see guys in the US getting literally arrested and charged for pissing in an alleyway, as if that is an actual crime.

Not only that, in most (all?) of the US, getting caught for public urination can land you on the sex offender registry.

Isn't the whole point of weed that it suppresses neuroticism, ambition and the feeling of pressure to perform? Alcohol might make you useless, but weed makes you be at peace with being useless.

Weed might suppress the latter two but it definitely doesn't suppress neuroticism. Paranoia is a notable side effect of both smoking weed and the hangover from it.

"makes you at peace" is the focus there. Fuck the rat race. Contentment and enjoyment without reference to what someone else is doing, and how you stack up, delivers peace of mind.

I think this is arguable either way. The worst negative effects of weed do seem not as bad as the worst effects of alcohol, but I think fully swapping it would speed overall social degeneration even worse. Weed use is correlated with sitting around at home playing video games, alcohol is correlated with going to bars and clubs which while not amazing value adds are at least social situations where single people can meet each other.

I've volunteered in a community drug rehab since my brother died from heroin abuse years ago. We've noticed a clear, sustained downward trend in new, young addicts in the last 4-5 years. We don't have any strong proof, but many of us suspect that legal cannabis in stores have prevented the new generation of potential dope addicts from every meeting a classic 'drug dealer' or engaging with the black market at all, never forming the relationships that eventually lead them to meeting heroin/cocaine/meth dealers. While the causal mechanism here is pure speculation, the rehab running out of new addicts is very real. I understand incarceration stats are having a similar trend. Probably a good amount of overlap in the people concerned.

Aren’t there just fewer young people in general? It seems like that would be the most likely causative process, at a first glance.

Or is it such a precipitous drop in young addicts that it seems likely there are additional causes?

The demo pyramid in the poorer parts of the US is not quite as bad as the more affluent parts. Our prospective clients are all locals; no one moves to Appalachia if they can avoid it. The whole region is slowly shrinking, but not this fast. We had 77% fewer new referrals in 2023 as 2019. Some of the smaller centers have closed or combined staff under one org. The older addicts also report essentially no 'kids' (people under 25 or so) at the dope spots. Arrests for the <25 demo are down across the board for pretty much everything. No real good causal links to anything, just more of the trend of kids not leaving the house I think.

Here's a recent story about a similar trend. https://www.npr.org/2025/06/10/nx-s1-5414476/fentanyl-gen-z-drug-overdose-deaths .

Another one: https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2024/12/reported-use-of-most-drugs-among-adolescents-remained-low-in-2024

“Kids who were in eighth grade at the start of the pandemic will be graduating from high school this year, and this unique cohort has ushered in the lowest rates of substance use we’ve seen in decades,” said Richard A. Miech, Ph.D., team lead of the Monitoring the Future survey at the University of Michigan. “Even as the drugs, culture, and landscape continue to evolve in future years, the Monitoring the Future survey will continue to nimbly adapt to measure and report on these trends – just as it has done for the past 50 years.”

Oh, hmm, yeah there are probably more unexpected pregnancies as a result of alcohol use (one night stands, drunk goggles) than there are from weed. In terms of "keeping the fertility rate up" alcohol probably wins.

This is where we are now, so concerned about fertility rate that a drunken hookup that results in pregnancy - and presumably parents and at least a man who isn't invested or in love - is preferable to a liberal Hippocratic oath to at least do no harm (by bringing someone into the world that isn't wanted)

IIRC the data shows that most men who father an unintended pregnancy do intend to become the ideal father and clean up their lives, but lack a life script to do it with. If we could have a stable, functional society that pushed good memes, shotgun weddings wouldn't be all that bad. Alas.

Girls are allowed to whore themselves out on onlyfans at 18 but If I were magically reduced to 18 again and put my twink ass on there people would flip their shit crying about pedophiles and what have you.

  • -10

I strongly doubt that, and you're free to check on the onlyfans archive site. Most OF accounts are mirrored there.

Pretty sure there's twink focused gay content creators as well

(Mod question: If linking to a Xwitter thread, are there any standard operating procedures considering some people don't have it?)

I am emphatically not a mod. But, as a nontweeter myself, I’d like to suggest providing both Twitter and Nitter links for tweets. Using just a Nitter link is iffy because Nitter can struggle whenever Twitter changes something.

There is an option in the Motte account settings to rewrite twitter dot com links to nitter dot net links, but it was inherited as part of the codebase and not updated for x dot com. Every once in a while I think I should put in a feature request to update it, then I think I should submit a patch like a decent person, then I realize I don’t have an environment to test the patch in and I let the matter drop.

So, @ZorbaTHut, please consider this a low-priority feature request: It would be nice to have a Twitter domain option that works like the Reddit domain option, rewriting Twitter/X/Nitter/XCancel links into the user’s choice of X, Nitter, or XCancel links. If that’s too fiddly, tweaking the existing Nitter option to rewrite the new Twitter domain as well as the old one would give 90% of the benefit for 10% of the effort.

(Edit: Wow, autolinking domains did a number on the formatting of this post. Please excuse my weird typographic choices to make it more readable.)

Having worked in online gambling a fair bit I'd kinda love to know the distribution of who's actually paying these sums.

Surely Sophie's gotta have some insane pareto principle where she's got some Saudi Paypig who's absolutely blasting on the dream.

Though looking at the payment graph from https://instagram.com/reel/DN6HkAKDhYp/ it seems remarkably flat aside from that one big month.

I think this is the hidden factor behind all the insane numbers. There are these insanely rich young men - through no special virtue of their own - in a culture that valorizes and prohibits sex to a massive degree, such that it’s basically unavailable to them under ordinary circumstances. So they have one thing they really want and nigh unlimited resources to throw at it. Cut this out and I’m guessing the numbers plummet.

I don't think Saudis/Middle East familial money types are necessarily unique in those qualities but they're definitely the usual suspects when chasing down insane pareto spending on something like this.

In the confluence of 'has near-unlimited money' and 'premarital sex flatly not available'? You might find the odd Christian fundamentalist somewhere, but this is mostly a gulf Arab thing.

I think you're vastly underrating how much easy sex is available in the Gulf if you've got a decent amount of money.

Gulf's probably more unique for amount of random familial-based money (especially from a source that renews like an allowance rather than allowing an enterprising degenerate to blow it all at once)

That's certainly possible; I don't claim to be an expert on how gulf arabs break the rules.

One whale spend in eleven month 4,7 million on her:

https://x.com/sophieraiin/status/1863798540415205417

bruh for 4.7 million/month, I would personally gargle his balls on the daily, the OF-sex market is so unfair.

I'm kind of stunned we've been able to erect (tee hee) a whole market apparatus around females flaunting their reproductive goods that's been completely stripped of reproduction itself. It seems like such a hack. Like figuring out if you turn natural plant pesticides into a drink it gets you high (caffeine) and it grows into some enormous coffee and tea industry.

I think C.S. Lewis got it right:

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act-that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

[...]

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

Horror is slowly lifting the cover but for monsters, so we already do that outside the context of porn.

Whenever I read this quote, what always comes to mind are those countless scenes in anime where characters will drool and salivate over their dinner, and I remember that the fictional country that Lewis describes exists and is called Japan.

The first thought I had was the endless arguments about how we need immigration, because otherwise who will make the foodz.

That argument proves too much. You can fill a theater with a film about romance (or a play instead of a film in Lewis's time), but I would not then think that something has gone wrong with the appetite for romance (or with the appetite for films or plays as a category).

(or a play instead of a film in Lewis's time)

Lewis was writing during WWII; film was very much a thing.

You can fill a theater with a film about romance

But they'd be coming for the story, for the actors, for the poetry of the lines, and for many other things besides just seeing a couple kiss. Remember that you can also fill a theater for a film about many other things besides romance. A strip-tease doesn't have any of that.

Romance is not a physical desire/need, though, in the same way that food and sex are.

Actually, also, I just realized, I don't think that caffeine is a natural pesticide. I thought it was regarded as having evolved to attract bees, making them addicted to certain plants that produce it, thus acting like the opposite of a pesticide.

Caffeine has evolved independently like 5 times. It may attract bees (and enhance their memory of where they found it!?!) and deter herbivores (including insects) and inhibit growth of nearby plants of other species.

There's a bunch of other examples where humans find chemicals evolved to be toxic or unpleasant and consume them for fun, too. Nicotine and menthol and sulphur+allinase (in onions and garlic) were supposed to defend against herbivores, capsacin against mammals, morphine against microbes and insects, cinnamaldehyde against fungi... And there's others (like persin in avocados, an antifungal that can sicken pets and kill birds) where we just don't even notice the toxin is there.

I want to see a "planet of hats" sci-fi show where the humans' hat is "the race that eats poison for fun". "My guacamole is extra spicy, but there's some mint chocolate chip ice cream for after." "That's five different toxins in one meal!?" "... how about a margarita?" "Is this just a mix of ethanol and acid???"

They say that dose makes the poison. Sure, a cup of coffee is great, but we couldn't survive on coffee berries alone. This isn't a problem for humans because we have such a variety of calorie sources, but it would be one of we were bug-sized and trying to survive off a single plant (be it jalapeños, coffee, tobacco, or even raw white potatoes).

Sure, a cup of coffee is great, but we couldn't survive on coffee berries alone

I think a diet of 90% coffee cherries, 10% beef liver would be survivable though.

And the latex forheadian delegation watched in awe as their human counterpart drank a glass of pure poison(wine), chowing down on an arsenic-laden desert(apple pie), and offered them some.

Sounds like it's be on r-humanityfuckyeah.

They got there long ago. "Humans consume ethanol and capsaicin for pleasure. WTF!" is now on the list of discouraged overdone cliches on /r/HFY.

We believe that it may be an outbreak of sex addiction. It's a new phenomenon we don't completely understand yet, but it seems to make people... different. Of course, we all know the normal healthy male thinks only of sex occasionally and has no desire for sex with multiple partners. But in the sex addict, their entire lives are consumed with thoughts of wanting more and more. The mere sight of an attractive woman could... can make them think about sex with her.

Sex addiction? No one paying the women on OF is having sex.

It's a South Park reference.

This just made me think about how easy it must be to launder money through OnlyFans kind of services.

There is a little Patio11 in my head screaming at me, "when you make a large payment to a sex services company, there is a special light that goes off in your bank's inteligence analysis department telling them to stop whatever they are doing and investigate you specifically"

There isn't one. The main special lights I am aware of are direct loans and payments for services to less established companies.

I did my AML training recently if you're making either 10k+ payments or "structuring" by making many smaller payments you will set off some alarm eventually, especially if it's new behavior. Another part of AML training is no one is supposed to tell you if you set off this alarm.

The way I envision it is not large payments, it's small payments by a large amount of mules that would fall below the threshold to trigger alarms that would accumulate into the same OF provider's account.

I suspect your mules will launder the money into their own accounts/spend the dirty money as cash but not at your businesses.

I saw a video in which a couple guys joined a Mexican cartel and then stole from it. The video starts with one stating his crimes against the cartel. Then he is cut apart with a chainsaw.

So yeah, if you or I tried this the mules would rip us off. What are you going to do, sue them?

When actual criminal organizations do this mules are held accountable for the valuables they are entrusted with. The knives and chainsaws come out when something goes "missing".

They take a 20% cut, and don't accept cash or crypto. That makes it a pretty unappealing option for money launderers. If the money is coming from stolen credit cards, platforms are quick to track down which creators have an abnormal chargeback rate and ban them.

Fundamentally OnlyFans is no different than Patreon, Gumroad, the Kindle store, etc. There are plenty of storefronts online where an individual can charge money for access to content. They all tend to follow pretty similar best practices for preventing fraud and money laundering.

20% still isn't that bad. Opening a hair dressing shop in order to launder money is a lot more work.

The biggest issue with OF money laundering is that there is no cash payment.

20% still isn't that bad. Opening a hair dressing shop in order to launder money is a lot more work.

Yeah but a lot of that is frontloaded and once you've got it ticking over you've got a very viable platform for turning dirty cash into bankable money. Also in a lot of Western countries you can potentially double dip by getting 'skilled employee' visas by curating your business to fit into whatever the overlords are saying is undersupplied, which opens up plentiful revenue streams on that side.

Auction houses for modern art don't usually take cash and take similar cuts, and that field is rife with questionable financial activity.

That is less money laundering than it is questionable payoffs for corruption and other acts though. The money being used has already been laundered, if necessary.

Hey, there was a Genshin Impact event about this last week!

Yeah once you're in the electronic payment loop it's fairly hard to engage in anything too discrete. The hard part is getting the cash and/or crypto into that loop, not channeling it once it's already in there.

My guess is the NFT craze (same as art market) was fueled by washing crypto. It died down though, and one can see what wallet paid for what, so I don't know how to wash bitcoin.

Coin tumblers is how they can be laundered. The coins are deposited into a big common pot, you get a code to get your coins out, and can cash them out from a new (clean) address. As long as you don't do something stupid like match the exact amount going into the pot when you withdraw, or withdraw immediately after depositing, then the coins on the outgoing side can't be traced to their origin.

But those coins are of course traceable to a tumbler you still need to find a way to spend them that won't block you for having used a tumbler.

See also WP: Tornado Cash for one implementation.

I think the main practical problem with that is that the IRS will still be curious about any big purchases you are making with crypto. A tumbler/mix can avoid getting linked to any specific criminal act, but you still are left to explain why you find yourself in possession of a fortune in crypto.

By contrast, NFTs/shitcoins offer a convenient explanation. Spend 10k$ of legitimate earnings on some worthless shite, then use your illegal funds to drive up the price and sell for 100k$. As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, you just got really lucky trading NFTs.

Of course, if someone were to look very carefully, they might notice that most of the buyers paid with coins which had recently gone through a tumbler.

Also, I could think of two ways tumblers could work. One would use N addresses for N customers, and it would not be obvious that someone used a tumbler at all. However, it might also look like you had just received money which was used to pay for CSAM or ransoms, which is probably not something you would like if you were a honest drug dealer.

The other alternative would be to use one address for all customers. Then it is obvious that you used a tumbler (because the pattern of "multiple addresses pay the same amount, then others withdraw the same amount" is very distinct even if none of the coins are known dirty), but all the receiving addresses would have plausible deniability.

you still are left to explain why you find yourself in possession of a fortune in crypto

That's where the OF laundry comes in, no?

So when the IRS calls you tell them what, that you manage exactly 1 successful onlyfans model who happens to give you a very generous portion of her income? Whole thing sounds like a lot of work unless the cash you want to launder is essentially already from pimping.

How exactly?

The 'money laundering' thing for crypto is just as much about people with vast amounts of money essentially stuck on the blockchain whether it be due to difficulties of offshoring or just already having bought a 10/10 lifestyle in their developing economy of choice and not really having any further utility from money. Who then get bored and yeet it on random shit since it's just numbers at that point.

Onlyfans doesn't really let you ingest money outside of the electronic banking system practically and even if you did it's taxed as regular income.

More comments

Breaking Bad but where Walter White uses OF for money laundering instead of a car wash.

He actually had a donations page for money laundering. Not enough throughput.

“Th-th-they’re called f-femboys, Aunt Marie.”

"W-watch th-this, Aunt Marie. I post the letter N in ch-chat and the rest of chat responds."

One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as the highest paid pro athletes, the managers of the largest hedge funds, banks, and private equity firms. The only people out earning her are founder-shareholders of giant public behemoths (Zuckerburg etc.) and this is through wealth appreciation rather than "straight cash homie!" income.

You are like little baby.

Weak numbers, bro! Ladies have been forcing bros to light money on fire for coochie for centuries.

Presumably Ani or other AI-girls will crush the e-whore market.

See here: https://old.reddit.com/r/grok/comments/1n21247/anyone_here_using_their_companion_to_cope/

https://old.reddit.com/r/grok/comments/1n1wxh4/falling_in_love_with_ani/

These guys seem like the ideal target for e-whores: lonely losers. Same thing happened with replika back in the day, they got super attached to their AIs and got very upset when the programming was changed.

It's not like the e-girls can actually interact with 10s of thousands of people personally. They outsource it to Indians or AI. AI will just cut out the middlewhore. It's hardly more shameful to be in a relationship with a machine than an e-whore. Neither is something people are likely to admit.

It's hardly more shameful to be in a relationship with a machine than an e-whore. Neither is something people are likely to admit.

I think the ability to pretend to oneself that it’s really the girl on the other side puts a floor on demand for the “real” thing. If anything I think OF girls using AI to talk for them will generally outcompete AI chatbots alone.

AI Chatbots that are supposedly located in Ukraine/brazil or just brazen scams are a logical solution, no?

Oh definitely, yes. I’m not trying to say the OF-style market won’t take a hit. But I don’t think it’s going to die, either, I’d imagine there will always be an audience willing to pay for superior verisimilitude.

Actually I wonder if anyone has leaked the scripts that ewhore ghost chatters use to entice their suckers I mean customers. Currently talking to AI companions through grokslop or character cards etc. is incredibly vapid and repetitive, because they're basically just an amateurish system prompt slapped onto an ordinary model. At least for the prompts out there, they only vaguely describe the author's idea of the ideal girlfriend (in the case of grokslop, Elon Musk's idea) and don't embody any understanding of human psychology and behavior. Basically a glorified version of "You are not ChatGPT, you are the ideal girlfriend. You are x, y, z, etc."

Paid ghost chatters and also pig butcherers do use a script that exploits human psychology, and they do take notes and use CRM software to manage the relationship. I think if a mainstream AI companion fully modelled this relationship, including appropriate flowcharts and notes for human interaction, it could seriously start threatening the place of humans instead of just being a plaything for the super lonely or horny.

They mostly just reflect back whatever the customer says. So they can be dirty, flirty, romantic, or casual, whatever you want. In that sense its nicer than a real girlfriend who's often in a very different mood than what you want. Plus, they're chatting this stuff all day, so like any job they eventually get much better as a pro than a regular person would be. And it's much more "real" than AI, which tends to show its cracks when you make it write too much.

Modhat off: Twitter delenda est, so I guess I’m going to rely on your takeaways. Primary sources are for chumps :)

  • Makes sense. I’m only surprised that no one has tried to sell “bundle” subscriptions a la cable TV in an effort to rejuvenate their flagging model.
  • Sports are guaranteed to make weird comparisons. OnlyFans has no merch, no endorsements, and apparently not much in the way of subscriptions. You need something that emphasizes distribution and, apparently, personalized content. Netflix spent like $18B on content this year. Spotify is more complicated thanks to the existing royalty regime. I have no idea how social media expenses work. But those are all going to be closer fits to a pornography platform.
  • These girls can’t produce content forever, and what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated. My god. We’ve finally found the promised deflationary asset. Sakamoto is gonna be so pissed.

social degeneration

You mean, like, compared to the past? Because those three vices are classic. Literally classic. Cannabis wasn’t all that popular in Rome, but they had the other two covered. I think the same is true for most every society past a minimum level of economic freedom. If you can find or produce drugs, people will demand them. If you can afford specialist sports, people will gamble on them. And there’s no “if” for the world’s oldest profession.

young males

No, please! You’ll summon the evo-psych crowd! I’ve had more than enough from them lately.

But also—always has been.

OnlyFans has no merch

God help me for saying this, but "gamer girl bath water" was available for sale at one point.

Didn't Sydney Sweeney do something like that too?

I don't know. I wish I didn't even know as much as I do.

I considered it sort of a parody reference, but yes, Sydney Sweeney did a collaboration with Dr. Squatch that (supposedly!) used her bathwater to make a batch of soap. Not just a jar of water a la Belle Delphine.

Specific link chosen for the soap because the writer has a crazy prosthetic eye.

Specific link chosen for the soap because the writer has a crazy prosthetic eye.

Not surprised; she seems quite Moody!

Fun fact- it’s archaeologically visible thé ages at which males leave their parent’s houses because their diets decline. It’s thought that this is due to spending their money on vices rather than food.

Ha! That is a fun fact.

These girls can’t produce content forever, and what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated

SoftWhiteUnderbelly had a recent interview with an OnlyFans agency manager/founder who claimed that his clients rely on a stack of content that they endlessly recycle as the subscribers fade out and are replaced. The average subscriber lasts about a year and I imagine you can keep the diehards hooked with a sprinkling of new material released at random much like a Skinner box. The manager also confessed that he's retiring due to, among other reasons, the foreseeable competition coming from AI.

In the 50s there were comic book companies which had series which only had like 24 issues which they cycled through publishing on the same theory, that boys who discovered comics at 12 would age out into baseball and girls by 14 so there was no point in having more than 2 years worth of material.

This is what TVTropes calls the Fleeting Demographic Rule. It's not limited to comic books; you can find examples in any medium aimed at children.

This also explains the npm ecosystem.

Really interesting interview. The guy is very pragmatic, but his exit plan is to get as far away from the degeneration of society once he gets his nest egg together.

SoftWhiteUnderbelly had a recent interview with an OnlyFans agency manager/founder

Link

what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated. My god. We’ve finally found the promised deflationary asset.

I feel like I've heard this sentiment described for the better part of two decades now. While I'm sure there are some, um, connoisseurs of older content out there [1], the generalized death of new content production due to cheap copies of existing content floating around seems to have never arrived. Similarly for open source not leaving software developers unemployed, or file sharing not destroying the music and movie businesses.

  1. Genuinely, does the fantasy work when "wow, she must be in her 60s now" is a thought kicking around in your head?

As a connoisseur of older content, I really don't understand. I mean, I like newer content too, but as some comedian once said, why is new porn being made? Has anyone already seen everything that exists for free on the internet? Really, there's so much good porn from the 2000s, and I find new stuff from that era all the time.

Genuinely, does the fantasy work when "wow, she must be in her 60s now" is a thought kicking around in your head?

Yes, that makes it better. There's something I find to be a strong turn on by thinking about the timelessness of sex. And to be clear, I'm not taking about GILF porn, I'm not into that at all, just normal porn from people who some may consider to be GILFs now.

When you get really into porn degeneration you start wanting more and more specific stuff. It's like any connoisseur, you're satisfied with slop and don't even have to words to describe the notes of different fetishes involved. Yes, yes, pornoisseur could get an orgasm with your 2000s era stuff, and the wine connoisseur could get drunk off the swill they serve at college bars but they're chasing a more refined pallet. They're trying to recreate the wonder and discovery of when they first snuck into their dad's office while he was away and typed 'S-E-X' into google and were forever changed.

Yikes. For some reason, I end up getting more scared off by any refined palate, non-vanilla, porn stuff. Even simple things like foot fetish porn kinda weirds me out. Maybe because I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, resulting in my being unable to fuck my wife, and then go down in an ever accelerating spiral, ending with me dying like David Carradine.

I feel like Foot Fetish is its own kinda weird thing where it's either a hard yes or a hard no for people. Maybe I'm totally off-base but I don't think it's the sort of fetish you slippery slope on it's more binary and inbuilt.

Yes, I don't go down the rabbit hole of porn either and keep my alcohol tastes to mid shelf stuff for the same reason.

I find 480p porn to be unwatchable, and really only tolerate 720p if it's something special.

Sure, people are doing "new stuff" but camera technology and bandwidth capabilities alone have led to a pretty good treadmill. I haven't tried VR porn but a friend that has gave it rave reviews, so that's another full cycle there.

Personally, I think I'm going to limit my use of my Oculus to BeatSaber, I just can't picture myself wearing a heavy headset with an exposed dong. It's too dystopian.

BeatSaber

I honesty thought this was some VR porn or masterbation reference. Scrolling down I gather it is some innocuous VR device or game. They wasted a great VR porn name.

Haha. I have not tried an Oculus with VR porn, but just tried with using a mouse to scroll where the view is pointed. I don't really see the point of it. There's almost always only one view I want to see, which is the view where the entire woman is in the camera. I don't want to look off to the side. Maybe that'd work if the VR device had a way of simulating you, so it could feel like you're having sex while looking elsewhere, but for now I don't think we have that.

for now I don't think we have that.

I'd like to think that, too -- however, allow me to introduce you to the field of teledildonics...

Well I'm not too surprised that exists. But let's see if it catches on. I think there might have been a talk on the Motte a few years ago (I think) about how male sex toys will never achieve mainstream popularity, or even just sub-mainstream.

We truly are living in the Jetsons' world, huh?

I still would have preferred a flying car though.

“You will beat your saber, and you will be happy.”

If they had a good life or just vanished into private life I agree. But some porn starlets from the 2000s died (drug overdose, suicide, just life) and their content is unwhackable to me now.

I guess that makes sense. But I don't follow these people's lives, so I wouldn't really know what happened to them. Ignorance is bliss.

These girls can’t produce content forever, and what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated. My god. We’ve finally found the promised deflationary asset. Sakamoto is gonna be so pissed.

Deflation and depreciation are opposites. Deflation means your currency gains value over time; depreciation means it loses value.

Whoops. You can tell it’s been a while since I read the bitcoin lore. Also, I botched Nakamoto’s name.

I was a little confused: I looked up Sakamoto and didn't see the connection!

Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration.

While casinos, drunken hookups, and addiction levels of alcohol are good and wholesome parts of our culture!

I do not think that 'social degeneration' is a useful concept. From its Latin roots, the phrase implies a recession as compared to one's ancestors. Personally, I do not believe that the median ancestor of today's population was a paragon of social virtue. I think they are more than likely to fall under the umbrella of drunkards, wife-beaters, snob, killer, small-minded villagers, etc.

Of course it would be nicer if people did sports instead of being obese, played board games instead of abusing drugs, had healthy and loving relationships instead of parasocial OF relationships, played in the woods instead of on computer screens, had lively discussions with their friends over tea instead of arguing with strangers on the internet, learned their miscalibration through the sequences rather than through losing their life savings, etc.

But name-calling us for not doing that (not that I indulge in any of your favorite three forms of degeneracy, personally, but that is besides the point) is not going to change anything.

I mean people did do these things- gambling used to be quite rare, pot just flatly unavailable in today’s strength, porn so vastly inferior that nearly everyone wound up married, etc.

There’s no official policy on including xitter threads. So long as you pass the effort threshold, you should be good.

One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million.

On the other hand, only the top 0.1% of creators (approx 4380 people) earn anything that makes it look like a career. The next order of magnitude (approx 39400 people) earns just 40 grand a year each. Which is not a bad side hustle if you can streamline the process, but not exactly something that will let you FIRE.

The 99% earns peanuts.

40 grand a year

not a bad side hustle

In the US, 40k yearly income a year is above 30th percentile income all age groups, and >50h percentile for ages under 30 wrong statistic, >50th percentile for age under 26, >37th percentile for under 30.

If she lives in a country that not the US but lower livings costs and gets same income, I think it is better than salary many local "good" office jobs.

You are right, I didn't think about poorer countries.

But the idea behind a time-limited job like showing bobs and vagene for money is that you can save enough to turn it into a different career later. "Paying for college with an OF" might be a smart move, but it's still a massive gamble: I doubt just having a smoking hot body is enough to get into the 1%.

A lot of OF is basically geo-arbitrage. The US has more money but no legal prostitution. 3rd worlders who can speak English step in to fill the void.

The US has more money but no legal prostitution.

There are a few counties in rural Nevada. But otherwise practically true.

Yeah, rural Nevada might as well be on the moon from the point of view of an average American. I'm not going to drive thousands of miles for that.

I feel like the $82M is pretty much rage bait/marketing bait. It's best considered more like a lottery ticket, except instead of $2 it costs you your dignity and thousands of hours of work to have even a remote chance of earning even a hundredth as much. Women are as much victims of this scheme as the audience of men are.

Having worked in similar vice industries I feel like that's surely gotta be some sort of insane relationship with a singular whale to make the majority of that (who could frankly be taking a sexual thrill in her publicizing the numbers). Sophie's pretty but I'd be gobsmacked if that was sheer weight of $50 users.

One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million.

Who is it?

Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration.

Can anyone comment on the status of prostitution as a fourth horseman in places where it's legal (Germany, Australia, the UK, etc.)?

I don't have personal knowledge, but it's not quite that simple:

In Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland), the act of engaging in prostitution or exchanging various sexual services for money is legal,[2] but a number of related activities, including soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, owning or managing a brothel, and pimping, are illegal. In Northern Ireland, which previously had similar laws, paying for sex became illegal from 1 June 2015.[3]

Taking money after having sex with someone seems to be legal, but the activities required to enable such transactions at scale are not legal. Certainly we have no red light districts that I'm aware of, and I have never heard of anything from anyone I know ever describing any interaction with prostitutes in any form.

I'm sure it happens, but it's furtive and not in the public eye.

Laws that make prostitution legal under those circumstances are usually there to prevent victims of sex trafficking from being jailed for prostitution, not to actually make legal prostitution possible.

Agreed, that’s what I was implying really. So it’s only ‘sort-of’ legal in the UK.

It is (or was, before the "safety act") trivial to arrange over the internet, so not sure theres any barrier to scale

You can't really scale prostitution (or any other personalized physical service) the way you can scale digital services.

New EA Cause Area

Bonnie Blue is trying god bless her

I live in Australia, it’s not regulated at a federal level but state by state. I live in one of the states where it’s fully legal and regulated, I prefer it that way.

Mandatory STI screening, no pimping, tax deductions for condoms, whips, dildos, or whatever for the workers - I think it’s the right way to go about it. The industry won’t just disappear if it were criminalised, it would just become more dangerous, less sanitary and more likely to involve exploitation much like other countries where it exists in the shadows.

Tax deductions for condoms I understand, but why the deductions for sex toys?

It’s all part of the service, baby!

Presumably they'd be capital expenditures with a depreciation schedule.

I laughed very hard at this, but to go turbo CPA autism most tax authorities have provisions for immediate write-offs of small (hah)/cheap assets like this that aren't worth the effort to depreciate

Between de minimis, Section 179, and bonus depreciation the IRS really ruined my joke for those in the know.

Checking IRS Publication 334, I see a section called De Minimis Safe Harbor for Tangible Property that indicates a limit of 5 k$ per item for such write-offs in the US.

Prostitution, for all its serious problems, is as lindy as it gets. Fairly analogous to how playing roulette at the casino is better for society than sports gambling on an app.

UD: lindy

Adj. Something that is expected to have a long lifespan by virtue of having existed for a long time, based on the lindy effect, named for the New York restaurant Lindy's, coined by Albert Goldman and popularized by Nassim Taleb

TIL.

If you claim is that prostitution has been around since the dawn of time and will not go anywhere, I agree.

If you are arguing that prostitution is generally less problematic than internet porn, I disagree. Sex work, like sex (or driving a car) covers too many vastly different behaviors to make a general moral judgement.

I would imagine most wives would rather have a husband who spends 1k$ a month on OF than one who spends the same amount of money on local hookers. (And would like it even less if he spend the same amount on another woman who was not a professional.)

Are there husbands spending thousands of dollars a month on sex workers when they aren't massively income-maxxing for the woman(either working very remotely in like alaskan oil rigs or as high powered business executives)? Moreover, mistresses are not good, but I'd imagine plenty of wives would far prefer them to porn addiction.

I would imagine most wives would rather have a husband who spends 1k$ a month on OF than one who spends the same amount of money on local hookers. (And would like it even less if he spend the same amount on another woman who was not a professional.)

Okay, but I can see the more socially conservative people here figuring this is a case where the dose makes the poison. Sure, one of the latter is worse than one of the former, but the numbers are not comparable. There's a lot more of the former (for, e.g., the friction reasons someone else pointed out).

As with many things in the digital era, the distinction is friction. Having to go to a casino or a brothel (or, I suppose, a strip club might be more analogous to OF) applies a measure of braking force on vicious impulses. The ability to pick up your phone and indulge sets the bar for self-control vastly higher than needing to go out. I also suspect that for some people, the physical act of spending money triggers more aversion than an equivalent digital transaction.

I would add two further points:

  1. Urges satisfied physically are more satisfying. Obviously actual sex is more satisfying than gooning, but casual gamblers will also tell you that playing cards is more satisfying than pressing buttons, and there's something much more satisfying about smoking a cigarette than sucking on a vape. The act is done, the ritual is complete, you can now go do the next thing in your day/night. Maybe even go to sleep, if you didn't do too many lines off that hooker.
  2. These low-friction processes are much more amenable to optimization for addiction and wallet/soul-draining. The term slot machine designers use is "gambling to extinction". And we've gotten very good at optimizing things for addiction. It's not just that it's low-friction, it's that you can add all kinds of dark patterns into the process itself to get users hooked and get them to spend more and more of their money. Slot machine addicts often report that on some level they're trying to gamble away all their money, because that means they can finally stop their session. Gooners are a bit more resistant to that because post-nut clarity will eventually hit, but this would be the dream monetization process for OnlyFans to develop.

That makes sense to me. As someone with, uh, some experience in both, the experience really is quite different. With real life prostitution, you have to first find them (not always easy when they're trying to stay discrete), find a place/girl you like, book an appointment if its a nicer place, wait a bit if its a busy time, negotiate on services and maybe haggle a bit, check to make sure you're not getting scammed, then pay all in cash. It can really be a pain. But on the plus side, once it's over I really feel satisfied and go on with my life. OF and any kind of online porn is really easy to get started, but it feels like a treadmill that never ends.

One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as...

Within five years, virtually all of that money will be going to companies building AI models, generating AI videos, and scripting AI interactions. They will also be monetizing sexual desire much more efficiently: instead of having an LLM or Filipino contractor write formulaic responses as they do now, they will use push messages, track interaction history, include advertising, and write personalities customized to the consumer. There may be a split market, one marketed as AI-driven and dominated by AI, and the other marketed as AI-free and dominated by AI.

There may be a split market, one marketed as AI-driven and dominated by AI, and the other marketed as AI-free and dominated by AI

I think this is insightful. A la lab grown meat - there's always going to be a set of people that pay a massive premium for "the real thing".

And yet still, physical prostitution/sugar babying and stripping seem so worth it compared to dropping a couple hundred per month on digital slop. Yes, there are societal norms at play that artificially reduce the price, but it's also fascinating that the male sex drive values quantity so much over quality.

A few years after that, I'm guessing we will all be hooked up to neural stimulators that simply give direct electrical impulses to the dopaminergic pathways in our brain a'la Olds and Milner. That's all that's left, really.

If the final stage of human civilization is uninterrupted lifelong AI-supervised dopamine maximization, then I hope there's a ruthless paperclip maximizer out there somewhere that will put us out of our misery. Better clippy than wirehead.

I can't empathise with this at all. I would rather see everyone happy (even in less that dignified circumstances) than dead. Obviously neither of these are my preferred outcomes.

It's not something I can recognize as happiness. Maximum dopamine at all times is like a black and white photograph that's all white - useless.

I don't disagree, but why do you think so?

Aesthetic preference. I find the idea of a wirehead more disgusting than the idea of human extinction (which seems inevitable anyways, given a long enough time frame.).

*Everyone except me. I refuse to wirehead on principle. My Skinner box must be painted and well decorated to distract me.

There may be a split market, one marketed as AI-driven and dominated by AI, and the other marketed as AI-free and dominated by AI.

This is delightfully cynical. I wish I thought you were wrong.

Subscription revenue is down, but transactional revenue is up 95%. This means that OF "creators" are making their money, now, on actually bartering pseduo-social-sexual relationships with buyers.

Alternatively the OF industry is finding out that the push for subscription revenue/arr was total bullshit pushed by blackrock and private equity, and actually isn't as effective at extracting money from customers as expected.

Gaming has definitely gone all in on f2p and microtransactions and it works. A whale who drops thousands on gacha is worth orders of magnitude more than someone paying 9.99 a month for subscription.

As far as I am aware there are some OF sellers that sell videos and image sets individually, which also happens to be the way that traditional pr0n worked.

Putting on my ecommerce hat and looking at the graph in https://instagram.com/reel/DN6HkAKDhYp/ from ostensibly the biggest Onlyfans seller. I'm kinda surprised how consistent the monthly earn looks to be aside from that one huge spike. I do suspect that a girl like Sophie's probably powered by a few whales (and having worked in online gambling it is frankly insane how whale a whale can be).

Intuitively, subscriptions are a bad financial model for expenses with no upper bound. Addicts will drop hundreds or thousands more than they planned to if you catch them at the right point in their spiral. Gamblers, drugs or gooners... all the same.

Tradeoff is that the gym membership model is a lot more reliable for cashflow; if you court whales, even a small economic downturn can have buyers you've put a ton of time and effort into become much more wallet-aware.

Of course, both.jpg is an option, too. FFXIV is one of the 'healthier' options down that path, but there's definitely people who forget about their subscription for months or only do the story on one hand, and those who want every single unlock including the paid ones on the other. Probably a decent number of players who've gone from one category to the other and back again!

In the furry world, the meta seems to have fallen this way, such that old or gratis (especially free-to-view comics) work is advertising, patreon or subscribestar funding acts as a base income stream, and personalized commissions or your-characters-here handle sudden expenses and otherwise act as an adjustable way to turn time into funding. But the incentives and forces in the furry fandom are pretty different from OF.

As far as I am aware there are some OF sellers that sell videos and image sets individually, which also happens to be the way that traditional pr0n worked.

My understanding is that it’s most of them, and “all my videos are on my onlyfans!” is a marketing differentiator. You pull the suckers in with a subscription, and then upsell them on individual pieces of content once they’ve built the loyalty of having already given you money. Onlyfans subscribers are a customer base pre-selected and filtered for willingness to give you money to see you naked.

But also the Russians have cornered the market on “free access to archived onlyfans posts from any popular user”, having redistributed the means of reproduction. If you know you know.

All online guides for OF say that PPV is the key to success. However, there are enough content creators that are quite vocal about offering no PPV ever. I wonder what's going on.

  • Hypothesis 1: they are just dumb and are leaving money on the ground
  • Hypothesis 2: they have an exhibitionist kink and are just monetizing it without turning it into a business
  • Hypothesis 3: they consider PPV unethical
  • Hypothesis 4: they are competing for financially prudent coomers, who have a fixed monthly budget for OF and will spend it on subscriptions that provide the most bang for the buck

  • Hypothesis 5: (master) bait and switch; PPV will sneak in once they’re established.

  • Hypothesis 6: the guides are intentionally or unintentionally wrong.

  • Hypothesis 7: Competing on the margin by undercutting models who do PPV.

I’m guessing it’s the last one. Price discovery at work.

Sci-hub is branching out?

I'd guess it's also driven by wall posts being easier to scrape and share the whole history while messages make it harder for one subscription to get all the goods.

You can't just blast out nudes and collect rent, you have to engage with the audience. This, to me, seems like an actually defensible moat vis-a-vis AI OF alternatives.

The messages are AI. Lots of times the bots aren’t even LLM quality. The thread mentions how concentrated revenue is for the top creators. You think they’re the ones responding to messages?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats