<story><title>Under the skin of OnlyFans</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57269939</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brazzy</author><text>&amp;gt; A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run.&lt;p&gt;This is something that&amp;#x27;s really been bugging me when looking at Reddit&amp;#x27;s porn subs. There has been a really noticeable change in the last 2 years. Back then, a majority of the posters seemed to actually be amateurs getting their kicks from online exhibitionism. Now it&amp;#x27;s 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen.&lt;p&gt;But what bugs me are the titles: they used to be descriptions of the content, sometimes addressing the audience as a whole. But now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like &amp;quot;Be honest, would you lick it?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.</text></item><item><author>ayngg</author><text>I think in general there are some pretty big costs that aren&amp;#x27;t fully understood to doing sex work, even outside of the social stigma of being found out by your friends and family, there are mental health costs that are often not talked about. A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run.&lt;p&gt;Social media in all forms grooms young naive women into feeling these types of careers are lucrative (which they can be) and even empowering, but I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply.&lt;p&gt;I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, or of rebranding sex work in western society. While things like onlyfans have helped with issues of exploitation, it has really changed the game into one that is not well understood yet.</text></item><item><author>throwmeawaydddy</author><text>Fire up the throwaway!&lt;p&gt;Not 100% related to the article, but directly related.&lt;p&gt;I worked as developer for a product in the same niche (&amp;quot;democratizing adult content&amp;quot;). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the  analytics engine (all pre-covid).&lt;p&gt;Anyway, on to the comment at hand.&lt;p&gt;We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creators). The average monthly payment was $5000 (skewed massively by the top 5%).&lt;p&gt;We had phone support for our larger creator. One very common request was to instantly delete all data and stop processing future orders. Usually, the requester was in a pretty agitated&amp;#x2F;distraught state (I&amp;#x27;d occasionally get escalated calls to &amp;quot;confirm&amp;quot; that all data would be deleted ASAP and no copies would be kept).&lt;p&gt;I spoke to a few of our creators and most would be desperate to scrub all of their content form the internet because:&lt;p&gt;a) A parent&amp;#x2F;relative found out.&lt;p&gt;b) A fellow employee at their 9-5 stumbled on their account.&lt;p&gt;c) A &amp;#x27;fan&amp;#x27; went nuclear and was waging all out digital war. One creator had a former subscriber sending data dumps to all their Facebook and Instagram friends (they also spammed every public email address at their &amp;#x27;normal&amp;#x27; workplace, which was a local government).&lt;p&gt;We would occasionally get demanding letters requesting the removal of content from third party sites (Pornhub, Reddit, etc). The creators would somehow be surprised when they realised we couldn&amp;#x27;t remove content from other websites.&lt;p&gt;The experience was very depressing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>roenxi</author><text>Probably bad for the mental health of the men too. As the thread ancestor noted - sometimes &amp;quot;&amp;#x27;fan[s]&amp;#x27; [go] nuclear and was waging all out digital war.&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m guessing that is just a thing some men do but it is bound to be made worse by women correctly figuring out the high-engagement equilibrium is tantalising without promising. But a lot of them probably aren&amp;#x27;t going to realise that they&amp;#x27;re dealing with unexploded ordinance; that could foreseeably lead to some spectacular meltdowns for men who were already mental health edge cases when it dawns on them that their time is being wasted.</text></comment>
<story><title>Under the skin of OnlyFans</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57269939</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brazzy</author><text>&amp;gt; A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run.&lt;p&gt;This is something that&amp;#x27;s really been bugging me when looking at Reddit&amp;#x27;s porn subs. There has been a really noticeable change in the last 2 years. Back then, a majority of the posters seemed to actually be amateurs getting their kicks from online exhibitionism. Now it&amp;#x27;s 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen.&lt;p&gt;But what bugs me are the titles: they used to be descriptions of the content, sometimes addressing the audience as a whole. But now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like &amp;quot;Be honest, would you lick it?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.</text></item><item><author>ayngg</author><text>I think in general there are some pretty big costs that aren&amp;#x27;t fully understood to doing sex work, even outside of the social stigma of being found out by your friends and family, there are mental health costs that are often not talked about. A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run.&lt;p&gt;Social media in all forms grooms young naive women into feeling these types of careers are lucrative (which they can be) and even empowering, but I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply.&lt;p&gt;I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, or of rebranding sex work in western society. While things like onlyfans have helped with issues of exploitation, it has really changed the game into one that is not well understood yet.</text></item><item><author>throwmeawaydddy</author><text>Fire up the throwaway!&lt;p&gt;Not 100% related to the article, but directly related.&lt;p&gt;I worked as developer for a product in the same niche (&amp;quot;democratizing adult content&amp;quot;). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the  analytics engine (all pre-covid).&lt;p&gt;Anyway, on to the comment at hand.&lt;p&gt;We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creators). The average monthly payment was $5000 (skewed massively by the top 5%).&lt;p&gt;We had phone support for our larger creator. One very common request was to instantly delete all data and stop processing future orders. Usually, the requester was in a pretty agitated&amp;#x2F;distraught state (I&amp;#x27;d occasionally get escalated calls to &amp;quot;confirm&amp;quot; that all data would be deleted ASAP and no copies would be kept).&lt;p&gt;I spoke to a few of our creators and most would be desperate to scrub all of their content form the internet because:&lt;p&gt;a) A parent&amp;#x2F;relative found out.&lt;p&gt;b) A fellow employee at their 9-5 stumbled on their account.&lt;p&gt;c) A &amp;#x27;fan&amp;#x27; went nuclear and was waging all out digital war. One creator had a former subscriber sending data dumps to all their Facebook and Instagram friends (they also spammed every public email address at their &amp;#x27;normal&amp;#x27; workplace, which was a local government).&lt;p&gt;We would occasionally get demanding letters requesting the removal of content from third party sites (Pornhub, Reddit, etc). The creators would somehow be surprised when they realised we couldn&amp;#x27;t remove content from other websites.&lt;p&gt;The experience was very depressing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tinco</author><text>The titles on sites like pornhub are a lot worse. Sometimes I feel like they&amp;#x27;re automatically generated or something, with weird sexual fantasies that aren&amp;#x27;t even remotely in the video. It&amp;#x27;s become a bit of a meme, and it certainly has always been present but for example the incest stuff, it&amp;#x27;s just disturbing to me to the point where I greatly prefer browsing on Reddit just because the titles are more tame.&lt;p&gt;Another cultural thing, they&amp;#x27;ve recently started automatically translating the titles to my native language, and I don&amp;#x27;t know why but the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. Automatic translation is always annoying but here it&amp;#x27;s especially jarring.</text></comment>