Thanks Bob Dole. Idk why my parents didn’t vote for you in the 90s

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.)

Ugh so much pressure! 😭 I have some very smart colleagues who have written pieces on these issues. I will try to compile a few in a post here soon.

It’s libbed up over there for sure, but membership has more than doubled in the past couple weeks so maybe there will be a shift or at least little enclaves of cool people, similar to Twitter.

Weird left twitter started showing up in force a week or so ago. It's still rancid but at least when you're screaming at libs you're not screaming alone.

Wait a minute lmao this is not the same thing. This is a crypto thing

I heard it’s the number 1 free app in the app store right now, but haven’t bothered to confirm this.

Yeah I addressed this in another comment, but this will happen if Bluesky gets big enough. That’s just the joy of being a SW! But we’ll use it until we can’t. We’re very adaptable like that because we have to be.

The reason I thought it might be relevant here is that we are pretty much always early adopters, so often the masses tend to follow us, whether they’re aware of it or not. We’ve been on there for a year or so but this is the first really big migration that I’ve personally witnessed.

My opinion as to why Switter never really took off is that a SW-specific platform is too niche. Clients/customers didn’t really follow us over. It’s super difficult to get people to switch to new platforms; Emile Torres did a great episode of Kelly Hayes’ “Movement Memos” podcast about “switching costs,” why it’s so hard to move people to a new platform, and what platforms can do to mitigate those costs.

Also, Mastodon just seems a little too nerdy for the general public if I’m being honest 😬

That one was a 4chan thing first I believe

Source: I was an insufferable 4chan dweeb in the mid 2000s

Can you elaborate? I didn’t even know Reddit existed back then

Yeah, we’ll see. I made my account a year ago but abandoned it. It’s super hard to maintain all these damn social media platforms, and BlueSky was not taking off because of the silly “invite only” gatekeeping. Switching cost is a major barrier. I think they’ve done a bit to address that with the “starter packs” option that allows people to mass follow or mass block curated lists.

This is the first time I’ve seen a push from so many well-known SWs with large followings to move over, so it feels a bit more significant.

I should have clarified that I don’t plan on leaving Twitter. I remain firm in my commitment to ride that bitch til the wheels fall off. They will have to remove me. But I am trying to migrate as much of my following over there as possible.

And as for whether it will be a SW haven: it won’t. None of these platforms are. If it’s good for us, it will be good until it isn’t. It’s just the way of things for us. The only way to survive as a SW is to make peace with the fact that you might wake up one day and find your primary source of income gone, either because the platform was seized or they changed TOU and/or you get deleted.

Regarding Mastodon, I just feel like it’s too nerdy for the general public. We had a Mastodon instance called Switter but we never really had clients embrace it like they do the mainstream platforms.

No but you have to pledge undying fealty to Hildawg

I agree. Dorsey’s Twitter was probably the best we’ll ever get. I’m sure he’s a piece of shit like the rest of them, but the golden days of Twitter were something else. We shall never see their like again 💔