Once upon a time, Twitter was paradise for sex workers. We could post our thirst traps, network and build community with each other, find clients, and build a following. Then came the hateful algorithms with their dreaded shadowbans. Building a following became virtually impossible, and our posts were hidden from our actual followers who WANT TO SEE THEM BC THEY FOLLOW US! We tried to warn the masses that these tools would be weaponized against political dissenters, but predictably we were mostly ignored. (We’re trying to warn y’all about banking discrimination and the dangers of facial recognition technology too but that’s a subject for another post. Just know that they always test their hateful tech tools on us first, then roll them out for the respectables and normals.)
If you are interested in learning more about this, check out Hacking Hustling’s piece
Anyway, when Melon Husk bought Twitter, we knew it didn’t bode well, but some remained hopeful due to all his yapping about “free speech.” Of course things only got worse for us under Apartheid Clyde, but most of us have stayed because it remains one of the only platforms where you can post tit without catching a permaban for it.
I guess the Neo-Nazification of the platform culminating in the re-election of Trump with Elon’s help has finally pushed us over the edge, because there has been a huge migration over to BlueSky (aka LibSky.) Will it be better? Probably not. But for now, the shadowbans are minimal and fascists don’t appear to be tolerated so here we are.
Y’all may or may not realize it but sex workers tend to be at the forefront of new tech trends and innovations. When a new platform pops up, we’ll be there shortly with innovative new ways to sell hole. So I predict that LibSky may just take off.
TL;DR: if you post tit, they will come
Yeah there’s this switcheroo tech companies do where they establish an initial value/user base on the adult content side of their platform but then try to pull the rug out from under it once they’ve hit critical mass and want access to more prudish investors’ money (see: OnlyFans’ aborted attempt to cull the hardcore content from their site).
This is definitely a thing, but I have a different take on OnlyFans in particular.
I don’t think they ever wanted to get porn off their platform. Unlike sites like Reddit and Twitter, they started as a porn site and they have always made all their money from porn. They really started raking it in during the height of COVID, and when the platform got huge, that started attracting unwanted attention from Big Banking. It’s difficult and expensive to maintain reliable credit card processing as an adult site because these big banks have very strict and ever-evolving puritanical rules about what types of content they’ll process payments for. Run afoul of these banks, lose the ability to process Visa and Mastercard, and your business is dead in the water.
By appearing to pivot away from hardcore content and aggressively promoting SFW creators, it’s easier to make the case to credit card companies that it’s not just a porn site.
OnlyFans makes an astronomical, disgusting amount of money. They know where their bread is buttered. It’s a soulless capitalist enterprise, they don’t give a shit about the “morality” or porn or anything else. Their only goal is to maximize profits, and every decision they make can and should be viewed through that lens. They don’t sell paid ads on their site so they don’t have to worry about advertisers pulling out the way sites like Reddit and Twitter do. Plus Reddit and Twitter were never making real money off adult content on their sites; we have always driven tons of traffic to their platforms but they don’t actually profit from our presence there beyond the traffic we bring, so it’s easy for them to discard us once the users are already there and invested. None of that is true for OnlyFans.
FWIW, this is not a popular take among my peers. Most seem to think OF is like the other tech companies that want to boot us once they get big enough. But I think there’s decent evidence that OF does not want to do that and will never do that. Not because they care about us or anything, but because our porn makes them hundreds of billions of dollars (probably.)
Hmmm, how do all the traditional porn sites avoid that issue? Do they have access to different processors? Or does the parasocial aspect mean OF has a lot of add-on services that blur the line between porn sex work and “sexual services” that the processors balk at?
The traditional porn sites also struggle to retain payment processors and pay exorbitant transaction fees (10%+)
There has been a big crackdown recently due to the rise of Christofascism
They alllllll go through CCBill, more or less.
do banks have a material incentive to crack down on SW?
As far as I know, not really. This is one piece of the puzzle I don’t understand: why do they care so much?
My best guess is that it’s due to the higher frequency of chargebacks on adult transactions, but they already mitigate this with high processing fees so I just don’t get it.
Maybe it's labor discipline? SW might put upward pressure on wages as employers compete with a form of lucrative self-employment available to millions of workers?
They're under a greatd deal of pressure from varying cults - catholics, mormons, christian fascists, that demand they starve sex workers for ideological reasons. And if you step back a bit that feeds in to the way occult organizations use control of legitimate sex as a whip to control people, which is a core tactic of patriarchy, which is an essential component of class oppression.
So it's a bit convoluted but yes.