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So onlyfans owner has died of cancer.
Which means that in the next 72 hours we will hear a lot of hot takes about onlyfans. Then it will be Trump all over again.
One of the things I noticed when trawling reddit was absolute lack of sympathy from anyone. The guy may have been the most exposed to culture war dude in the world - some hate him because of onlyfans, some hate him because he is jewish and aipac donor.
For onlyfans - I don't think this is boon for humanity. And I think in a way it is just Sports Betting but for women. Mild to severe ruin of your life for the slim chance to make it big. There could be such things as too many creators, too many influences, too many habibis living in Dubai and Bali.
I remember when OF became a 'thing' right around Covid times when even the sex workers had to figure out how to work from home.
I recall that there was a brief-ish period where the benefit was that Onlyfans WASN'T a sex worker site, so there was just enough plausible deniability that a woman could create one without admitting she was going to post nudes. And they would start with standard racy photos before getting the hardcore stuff.
Hell, I can recall that VERY brief period where a certain type of guy could 'get away' with pushing a girl to 'start an Onlyfans' because 'you can make so much money' and pretend to hide behind nonprurient interest.
The thing I do wonder is about a few counterfactuals:
A) Covid lockdowns don't happen (big one, I know), do we see a noticeable rise in online prostitution at all?
B) If Onlyfans cracked down early, or was cracked down on early, does that function get replaced by a different site, or do things stay mostly decentralized and small. There were still sites for online whores, of course, but they were mostly sketchy and disparate and didn't have a fig leaf of respectability.
Instagram was still used for thirst-trapping, but monetizing that was more challenging, I think.
C) What if OF still arose for this purpose but we didn't have certain creators hit it huge (Amouranth and a few others I recall being the biggest profiteers early on), thus creating the illusion that huge wealth was up for grabs if you were willing to sacrifice your dignity. Does it draw in as many young women? I think a particular strain of female streamer becoming popular was a prerequisite to OF rising.
D) And thus, in all of this, do we possibly never gain a central 'attractor' for women to dip their toe into sex work, and perhaps as a side effect less blatant and wanton online simping, since it would remain more relegated to the shady side of the internet.
In a sense I think the rise of a site LIKE OF was inevitable. We had feminists doing SlutWalks and pushing "Sex work is work!" well before then, and paywalled content was an established trend by then through Patreon et al., NSFW artists were already doing quite well.
So it seems unavoidable that some site would navigate the cultural, economic, and regulatory labyrinth to become the first 'mainstream' online whore store. And this one managed to hide behind the "its empowering the women, they get to choose exactly how and what they post, its really good for them" shield long enough to get entrenched.
On the other, a lot of surprising stuff happened in the last 10 years that was probably a coin flip at best towards going 'the other way' (Trump 1, for sure) so who knows.
B) is the most surprising, in my opinion. I guess they pulled it off by buying out an established SFW business, switching it over to NSFW, then hoping that they could become "too big to fail" before the credit card companies and app stores caught on. They did eventually get banned from app stores, but amazingly they still apparently use Stripe for credit card processing.
What's crazy is that for YEARS they kept up the facade of "any popular figure can be on here for completely innocuous reasons, with completely normal fans giving them money!"
As if people were genuinely signing up in droves to watch cooking videos put out by a B-list football player or some wannabe pop singer talking while she put on makeup. As if there wasn't literally ONE and ONLY ONE thing that a guy would immediately plunk down money to get from an attractive woman on the internet.
I guess they HAD to keep that up so they could let their payment processors keep looking the other way.
And in a way, the payment processors might prefer that OF be the central spot they have to deal with, rather than playing increasingly elaborate games with smaller companies ('Modeling' agencies, Cam sites, various file upload sites, for instance).
Another possible factor in all this was Backpage dissolving circa 2018.
Given how heavy the scrutiny against Craigslist and Backpage actually was, it IS rather amazing that OF has avoided serious inquiry, since it enables functionally the exact same practices.
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