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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14941 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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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.

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.)?

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.)

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.

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