Miscellaneous
From "Slippery Slope w/ Macy Ramos" Who’s Really In Charge Of OnlyFans? OnlyFans pitch has always been about intimacy. Not because most of the content is erotic (though it is), but because the interaction between creator and consumer is so direct. People subscribe not to OnlyFans as a whole, but to the feed of particular performers. Those performers often develop relationships of a sort with their fans; exchanging messages and personalizing content for particular quirks and kinks. It was a connection that a socially distanced world proved particularly hungry for. However, the platform's decision to ban: and then abruptly unban; explicit content highlights the other parties that were always lurking in the middle of the relationship. The company says the original decision was necessitated by concerns from OnlyFans banks and payment processing companies. That came after Mastercard announced stricter requirements for processing payments for porn sites to try to ensure that performers on the sites were of age and willing participants (OnlyFans does make their creators register with a legal government ID). It’s a reminder that the ability to instantly pay someone many miles away with whom you’ve never met; and whose real name you probably don’t know; doesn’t just come into being. Someone created that infrastructure, maintains it, and your ability to use it depends on their approval. It’s similar to a lesson that has been learned elsewhere. Small e-commerce merchants, reliant on Amazon to reach their customers, find their survival dictated by the internet giant's terms of service. Social media platforms such as Parler and Gab, seen as overly indulgent of racism and misogyny, lose their contracts with web hosters, forcing them to go dark. And in a world where single people increasingly find each other through their phones, those who are booted off of dating apps, for reasons that are sometimes unclear, can be essentially edited out of the dating pool. It is not excusing toxic online trolls or unscrupulous retailers or creepy daters to say that the rules we now rely on to deal with them are opaque, arbitrary and undemocratic. For the sex workers and performers who make their living on OnlyFans, there was always a sense that is was too good to last. Not that the deal for them was all that amazing. OnlyFans provides precious little for the 20% cut it takes of subscription fees: performers get almost no help promoting themselves, and often, have to track down and deal with content piracy on their own. The fact that OnlyFans has become a household name undoubtedly brought attention to what the company probably hoped would pass as a quiet course correction on the way to the initial public offering it is rumored to be planning. In the tweet announcing the reversal of their original decision to ban pornographic content, the company said it had “secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community”; assurances presumably secured from payment processors. It was a victory for content creators in an economy where, in general, they have few points of leverage, but it also made it very very very VERY clear who is still in charge. "Slippery Slope" Full Episode Spotify: https://spoti.fi/398bcEL Apple: https://apple.co/3AeM9Mh PodBean: https://bit.ly/3nxDFfG