OnlyFans reverses decision to ban sexy folk

Originally published at: OnlyFans reverses decision to ban sexy folk | Boing Boing

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Suspended, not abandoned. I expect another purge attempt to happen at some point in the future.

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This might be a good sign that companies are becoming less afraid of conservatives and more afraid of everyone else.

All I see here is the outcome of a week of the founders and executives realising that they’re not going to come up with any narrative for investors that gives the company the valuation they’re seeking that doesn’t involve being a platform for sexual content and parasocial relationships. The only thing they’re afraid of is not being able to cash out.

Pretty quickly after the IPO, I’d guess.

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My plans for a retirement GILFCam are back on!

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Thank you to everyone for making your voices heard. We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change. OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators.

Capitalist entities seem to all have things in common, and one of them is extolling the virtues of their carefully crafted corporate values while making decisions entirely on the basis of business (read: money). It’s gotten so bad that companies don’t even try to hide it anymore.

The real shame is how tangled individual people’s creativity and livelihoods have become with big business ventures which have wildly different mandates.

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I can’t find it anymore, but in the past several months there was a pretty heart wrenching article about several young girls whose lives were ruined when images and video of them ended up on the site without their knowledge.
Credit card companies responded to pressure by saying they’d stop offering their services to OF unless it put things in place to ensure consent of anyone featured and also that they were of age. (Basically, the bare minimum one would expect from a “legitimate” porn studio.)
Instead, it looks like OF tried to take the “easy” way out by saying, “fuck it, that’s too hard, even if it would help keep all our above-board sex workers safe and employed.”
I’m glad the pressure (hopefully) made them figure out a solution that protects creators and others.

ETA - my bad, I was mixing up pornhub and OnlyFans. Thanks @fiatrn.

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It’s good news, but I agree, it seems tenuous at best. Who knows when they’ll change their mind next. And was it the payment processors decision (which as far as I know haven’t changed), or the investors they were seeking, that were the original reason? Have they proven to whomever that they can police trafficking?

I want to believe we’re finally breaking the evangelical “moral minority” in this country, but I won’t get my hopes up until we find ways of keeping them from dominating issues of sexual morality by hiding their intent under more universally agreeable terms like “stopping sex trafficking.” Because for them, ALL porn, even fully consensual porn someone willingly engages in because they enjoy it, is trafficking and they’d love to ban it all.

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Speaking of which, this whole brouhaha inspired me to check OnlyFans out, although I wasn’t willing to fork over any money admittedly. Once I logged in, I could see content creator’s pages, although apparently none of it was porn. That didn’t seem to be accessible even via searching, perhaps I needed to toggle something in settings, perhaps one needs to follow direct links provided outside the platform. But almost every page on the home screen was heavily sexualized even if the content wasn’t (traditionally) sexy.

Nothing really profound, but I thought some might be interested.

A sample. Are “kitchen” and “recipes” some kind of code?

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Black And White Smile GIF by Okkult Motion Pictures

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Every time a company does something to warrant a totally obvious backlash, then a hasty reversal, I feel like we’re seeing a New Coke/Coca-Cola Classic-esque marketing stunt.

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What a great free commercial they “accidentally” created for themselves. I can’t help but believe that this was the intention all along. Millions of people who never heard of OnlyFans are now scouring it for their particular kink. Their content creators must be rejoicing.

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Papa-Cam, an idea who’s time has come!

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I feel like someone at Only Fans mapped out all the possibilities and came to the conclusion that no matter what, it would be profitable for them.

Option A - We drop nudity, get lots of press coverage, the conservatives are happy, and we get investor money. Win for OnlyFans.
Option B - We drop nudity, get lots of press coverage, there is backlash, and we get investor money. Win for OnlyFans.

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Wait til you see the OnlyFans creators who specialise in cable TV repair and pizza delivery.

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To be fair, I should point out that, yes, she really does provide recipes.

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The trifecta!

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They fix the cable?!
the big lebowski drinking GIF

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If i’m not mistaken, there is a comic about that, where a company finds the ideal number of stupid mistakes/backtracks they should have per year which maximizes their return.
It is probably from xkcd or Saturday Morning Breakfast Comics (SMBC), but i couldn’t find it.

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This was a surprising backlash?!

Hardly

(pun oh so very intended)

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