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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26774 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.

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.

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.”

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