I have a lot of trouble begrudging anybody anything in this, even though I don't like it. The models who own the pages can't possibly give everyone in their subscriber base what they want. The subscribers are looking for a product, and they're getting it. The comparisons some have made to infidelity or cheating seem misplaced: There's no real relationship here, except a business relationship, and expecting a random woman to shower you with attention for $50 a pop videos seems unrealistic.
The personalities described here - like Jason Rosario - don't seem like particularly pleasant people to spend a lot of time with. Their life goals and priorities are not mine. But like most porn, while it might be kinda gross, but it shouldn't be illegal or inherently subject to societal shaming (if Rosario was selling energy drinks, who would judge him the same way?).
The place for real unethical behavior, therefore, is on the margins: Taking unreasonable cuts of models' income (70%!). Negotiating different rates with different subscribers for the same video. What if a subscriber is having a genuine mental health crisis? What if they threaten to kill one of the models? Or themselves? Is Jason Rosario prepared to handle that?
None of those possibilities seem like reasons to just shut all of this down or do anything - not that I'm sure the article is advocating for that. I'm just not sure what else to do or consider in response to this phenomenon. I guess I just acknowledge it exists? I doubt the people in this story could be counted on to behave responsibly, but until they don't, I'm not sure what it matters.
I don’t think 70% is unreasonably high for a fully-featured agency doing everything from marketing, management, etc.
The value-add in this industry is not the model - there are plenty of beautiful women willing to take nudes in the world. The hard part is actually finding and extracting money from paying customers - cross-promoting with other models, spamming a million posts on every nsfw subreddit, having a human carefully determine how best talk to a customer and entice them into paying, etc.
Traditional porn studios of course take this farther - models just show up and act, and the studio pays for cameramen, editors, websites, marketing, promotion, distribution, etc. This is basically a smaller scale version of a porn studio, where now the actor is also the director and camera operator (although I would guess the largest accounts will have professional editors and the like) but all the other work is offloaded onto an agency.
I can easily imagine a Russian/Ukrainian model that doesn’t even speak a word of English (the traditional low-cost labour for the industry) using one of these agencies and making an order of magnitude more money after a 70% cut than they otherwise would.
The balance here is on who’s driving the value. Is the model special in some way such that they can draw large amounts of paying customers with little effort? Then they will accrue to themselves most of the profit in the industry. Otherwise it’s the people doing the marketing work that make the most money.
Do you give up X % of your business for a cash injection or go it alone? With the cash it could be a billion $ company, without it just a side gig worth -$'s.
Chatters are even more expendable. They don't even have to have a looks, only reasonably decent typing/writing skill. I wonder what it will take to replace them with GPTish ML model?
I don't know anyone on OnlyFans, but I know a few women who do "Just Chatting" Twitch streams and the psychological toll on them is huge. Having to give people constant attention, answer every question or at least acknowledge it, and provide a sort of faux-friendship in exchange for money is a really strange arrangement. Just yesterday a long-term supporter of one woman I know "confessed their love" to her, and will probably unsubscribe because she won't reciprocate.
Another interesting but sad fact is that a lot of those streamers have significant others, but they hide it from the audience because they believe they'll get more engagement.
Sure the same thing might happen in regular businesses, but the interactions are either shorter (eg cashier) or at least it's acknowledged as being entirely professional.
To be fair if they’re leading people on because it gets more engagement/money they really can’t expect it to be stress free. There’s always a choice to be made.
Why wouldn't the person reciprocate? I never would have imagined that emotional honesty exists in that type of relationship. Aren't people paying for the relationship?
Did you read the first paragraph? I’m talking about a Twitch streamer. People aren’t “paying for relationships”, they’re subscribing to get rid of ads and support the streamer, even though some expect a bit more.
The streamer won’t reciprocate because it is a random unknown person coming on a text chat claiming they’re in love with them. I don’t think this ever worked ever, but if you need further proof, she told me for a fact she won’t reciprocate.
For the models it is still only a business relationship, except in very rare cases. By the same token, prostitution can also be a meaningful personal relationship, as shown in the movie Pretty Woman.
I mean, a friend of mine was an escort, and certainly ended up in entanglements like that. At the end of the day you are two human beings. Whatever your professional situation, these things are inexorable.
As your sibling commented mentioned, even if they attempt to treat it as a business relationship, not all people can handle it. The mental toll of receiving affection and then basically fake reciprocating it is hard, and not everybody can take it.
> Negotiating different rates with different subscribers for the same video
price discrimination is good!
For the rest of it, banning porn is probably a losing battle, but surely we can make fraud illegal, like passing yourself off as someone else.
For the rest of the what-ifs, do nothing, or call the police. I don't think pornographers should have a special duty to act over a shopkeeper or bus driver.
A lot can change over a decades time. I hope and believe that porn will eventually be a lot more restricted than it is today, as the societal downsides become more and more apparent.
While ubiquitous access porn is relatively new (I think) with printed magazines and now the internet, one still has a great reference from something much older - prostitution. One might conjecture that if society hasn't determined prostitution to be universally bad and banning it everywhere, then the same thing wouldn't happen to porn. A lot of progressive nations these days (citation needed) are aiming to regulate and make prostitution safer, not outright ban it. Now, aiming and succeeding are different things, I admit.
>One might conjecture that if society hasn't determined prostitution to be universally bad and banning it everywhere, then the same thing wouldn't happen to porn.
These two things are hugely different. Kids can and do regularly begin viewing porn right at puberty. There was never such easy access to sexual simulation even with prostitutes. You also cannot photoshop a real life prostitute, or browse around for the most attractive one in the world. Every additional prostitute you are with is an extra price, whereas each additional porn star is free; it naturally leads to needing huge amounts of stimulation that's incredibly hard to get in real life unless you own a harem. And even then if you're into the really hard-core stuff you'd have a hard time finding willing participants.
Society DID recognize it caused problems and basically banned it everywhere (or at least made it frowned upon).
It's starting to look like removing some of the sexual morals that societies had used for hundreds of years is a classic Chesterton's fence style problem. Progressives didn't understand the good effects of some puritan policies and decided to throw it all out because it got in the way of them feeling good right now.
Sure there was some utility gained from those rules, but then we looked at them and the cost-benefit analysis is pretty clearly against them.
Limiting personal freedoms to satisfy old religious beliefs (some of which used to serve useful purposes) makes very little sense nowadays, especially that we have much much much better ways to get much better outcomes with regards to those purposes. (Eg. avoiding genetic defects due to incest, keeping communities growing to have enough people to replace those who are lost due to famines, disease, war, accidents.)
The cost benefit analysis can take generations and is still ongoing.
Cultures that have these rules and restrictions seem to be growing via positive birth rates while cultures that dont are stagnating and not growing and seem to be actively committing cultural suicide. So its not obvious to me which path evolutionary processes will choose to win out in the long run.
Source that we are overpopulated? We can shrink the population and still pollute irresponsibly. In the past when the population was smaller we certainly managed to ruin plenty. And we aren't running out of land or food either.
These "downsides" are mostly the pseudo-scientific imaginings of feminists and redpill conservatives. There's very little evidence that porn harms anyone so long as it features consenting adults - despite internet forums incessantly repeating the opposite. It's a classic case of people believing something because they heard it repeated over and over.
The thing with laws is that it doesn't matter where they "start"; it matters where they end. Open-ended laws are ripe for abuse, scope creep and selective enforcement.
> The place for real unethical behavior, therefore, is on the margins: Taking unreasonable cuts of models' income (70%!).
It's an open market without anything even remotely resembling a monopoly, where all parties involved are professional and can relatively easy exit a contract they find unfair.
That's a bit of a strange situation. I can't get angry about something like this.
On one hand, sure, the customer paid to talk to a specific model, and sure, scamming is wrong. On the other hand, those conversations are already so artificial and staged (and customers know it!) that it doesn't matter who has them. A service is definitely being provided, no harm done, just like "sending a post asking for an autograph" as someone below described.
> On the other hand, those conversations are already so artificial and staged (and customers know it!) that it doesn't matter who has them.
Do you know that for a fact? It's hard for me to understand the minds of these subscribers, but surely, if they're so invested in one particular model, of course it would matter to them.
I do know some people working in a similar line of work, Twitch "Just Chatting" streamers, where they basically sell "attention". They're not trained to do this kind of conversation, so there is a mental toll that comes with giving emotional attention to someone that's at best a stranger, unless they learn compartmentalisation. It can be very artificial, since they can be tired and not all that interested in the customers stories.
It is also hard for me to understand their mind, but I know several cases of people who claimed to have fallen in love with the streamers. Even on small channels that can be a weekly occurrence.
So yeah, it does matter for these types of buyers, and it would crush their world if they knew it was a bot, but the end result is kinda the same, because streamers/models aren't interested in them.
I don't think you can just say the customers know that everything is artificial and completely staged. Sometimes there are genuine parasocial relationships going on, especially with particularly vulnerable and lonely people who would pay for this. And what they're paying for is an interaction with that particular person, not someone pretending to be that person. Would you assert that the same service is being provided if it was a chatbot?
Instead of : "The only time he ever has to ask the couple for anything is when a subscriber refuses to pay for content without receiving video confirmation that he’s really talking to Dani" ...
It does matter to the customer of course, like I said, fraud is wrong.
But in practice it doesn't matter: even with a real chat, it's still one people getting their hopes up and another not caring and only doing it for the money.
From https://onlyfans.com/about.html Mission : "The site is inclusive of artists and content creators from all genres and allows them to monetize their content while developing authentic relationships with their fanbase".
Apparently we define "authentic relationship" differently. I think it's quite explicit in the article that the targets do not want just "content" ...
I would expect the business to be less profitable if the representant were to identify themself even with just an alias, no ?
>This seems no less real than a medieval nobleman's arranged marriage; infidelity or cheating was a big deal then.
The business transaction there was "I'll support you if you give me an heir." Infidelity is a clear breach of that fucked up transaction, which is why it was a big deal. Not really similar to buying a video online.
Weird coincidence, I met someone this past weekend who does exactly this. The one exception being that he targets models in developing countries - which makes it feel a lot closer to sex trafficking than an agency.
I believe the idea to set-up an OnlyFans agency like this is relatively popular among 'hustle porn' style "entrepreneurs" whose goal is to extract as much money from anyone as fast as possible. Which probably gives an idea about the general personality these people have.
And whilst I don't think that an agency like this is always morally wrong, there are a lot of grey areas and moral issues - potentially legal issues - that can arise depending on circumstances.
There's an obvious ethical issue with subscribers believing that they're talking to the model themselves, and yet they're actually talking to someone completely different. And to add to that the implications of the subscriber sending nude photos to be viewed by any random person is bad too. If the subscribers knew that they weren't actually interacting with the model, I seriously doubt they'd continue that transaction.
And I'm sure that fishing for models on Instagram to start pages can have issues too if the agency has some bad actors. What happens if a model no longer wants to work with the agency?
This definitely happens elsewhere, like live cam sites.
This isn't a new practice, but the stakes are higher.
It used to be that you could write to "celebrities" for an autograph. You hoped it was the celebrity who signed your thing and mailed it back, but in reality you knew it was probably their spouse or secretary. It wasn't honest, but it's not like they charged you money, and the emotional stakes were lower. They weren't pretending they were your buddy or your lover. They were just signing a thing for you.
With online adult media, there's that whole parasocial dynamic. The whole thing is made to make you feel like you have something like a personal connection with the model.
I wonder if there's a way to do it ethically, while also keeping it fun for the subscriber.
Like honestly the answer might just be transparency. ex: "Sometimes my assistant XYZ helps me answer the huge volume of messages I get. We'll always sign our replies with the name of the person who actually wrote the reply." etc.
Another way to be sort of honest is use letterhead that says "From the desk of Tom Cruise", that doesn't mean Tom Cruise wrote it just that it came from a desk he owns. The stamped signature is his approval of the message, sort of like when political ads say "I'm Bob Dole and I approved this message".
Agreed. To me, if you are extracting money from someone while pretending to be someone else, that is fraud - at least morally, the legal side seems complicated. The question is if the average consumer would still be willing to pay if they knew that the posts were ghostwritten. My guess is that most of the "whales" are lonely people who would only want to pay for a real interaction with the performer.
Even if it was actually the model doing all of the responding, it is still not a real personal connection with them. It is still just for the money. It is pretend no matter who types the words.
Not to mention Damien Hirst (and I suppose Warhol's 'factory' was the real pioneer). I don't understand it. My friend has a bunch of 'his' paintings - high six figures a pop at the very least - which look like things you could buy at IKEA (e.g. this one: https://imgur.com/a/TfPci2c).
These “pimps” serve as surrogates for the cammer, (consensually) impersonating them so that the cammer’s account can engage with more subscribers.
I wonder how convincing something like GPT-3 would be at this. I give it 5 years tops for 100% AI OnlyFans accounts to be commonplace, complete with artificial personalized livestreams.
The problem with GPT-3 is it’s too agreeable. It will agree to anything and promise anything - which is not a good idea in this context, to put it mildly.
It’s possible to prime it to take different personas.
If you start with a setup like “a conservation with a disagreeable chatbot” and give an example of some unfriendly back and forth it can pick it up and be unfriendly.
The recent case of the “sentient bot” at Google was apparently primed to be agreeable.
> Many are based in Miami. It’s a place where young marketing types have embraced a vision of what the internet is actually for that is at odds with Silicon Valley’s: less a utopian escape from reality than an infinite expansion of its strip malls.
I am glad there is a honeypot for people like this so they won't move here (SV or even SF)
Aversion to sex work aside, how’s this different than some of what’s done in Silicon Valley? Uber will happily extract the remaining equity in your car as you teeter on the brink of homelessness at which point DoorDash will be happy to make you your own boss. Maybe I’m just jaded because it’s hard to find a place to rent wherever there’s a booming market for Airbnb rentals.
Yeah, SF has become all about money since 2000 (well, since the gold rush 150 years ago) and is the kind of place that spawns the ubers and airbnbs, but SV is still quieter and mostly tech. It just doesn’t get the same press because new high speed interconnect isn’t a consumer item, nor is it as photogenic.
My aversion is against people paying for that. Prostitution is legal in my country but strip clubs and similar businesses are far less popular it seems. There is also a negative stigma against those visiting such places. Not sure if that is a bad thing to be honest. Of course Uber and DoorDash are exploitative too, probably even worse for workers. Most people probably don't do a serious calculation for car ownership and maintenance. Likewise I have an aversion against people using these services too and then complain about low wages. An Uber might be cheap but you might dearly pay for it later.
If you haven’t lived in either place, it’s difficult to understand. Capitalism abounds in both, but is expressed in very different ways in each place. The cultures are just wildly different. As a native Californian, I find Florida’s culture to be smarmy and tasteless, with people shamelessly flaunting designer labels and consuming conspicuously. Being seen is super important to a lot of Floridians. (It also goes a long way to explain why Donald Trump enjoys living there; he fits right in.)
Southern California (as influenced by Hollywood) has a bit of this problem too, but it’s far less acute by my observation.
In my experience it's the Californians I have known who were smarmy and tasteless, from both cities in California. Your comment is a great example of the snooty attitude those of us from flyover country have been tolerating our entire lives as it flows from our TV screens.
What you described is a sub culture of Miami. It doesn't describe anyone in Florida north of West Palm Beach, and completely disregards the Cuban-American population in Miami itself.
Or are Cuban Americans not representative of "real" Miami? Because if you forget about the Cubans, my wife is going to have to say something to you in rapid Spanish that you won't enjoy, even if you only understand her tone
I’m from neither FL or CA, but have lived (for 5 years+) in both S Florida, SV / SF, and a brief stint in LA. The cultures from all these places felt like two sides of the same coin. Compared to my native slice of fly over America, the flaunting and virtue signaling were pretty overwhelming
I’d agree, it matters not whether the surrogate for a person’s missing personality is a designer label and a lime green Lamborghini or a second home in Sonoma and ayahuasca trips to burning man.
The bay area’s aversion to any libido-inducing-anything was a mistake.
“Lets exclude people to make it more inclusive!” really hits a peak there and a lot of people don’t buy it
I’m glad to see this smoothing out geographically, especially since a lot of the same people move to Miami and partake in its allure and inclusion of body-focused participants in tech as well as sex workers
> The bay area’s aversion to any libido-inducing-anything was a mistake.
Uh, what? True, Silicon Valley has been more sedate in that regard, but SF has been / remains the home of everything from Kink.com to the SF Sex information library, to mainstreaming sex toys (e.g. good vibrations) and feminist sexuality (Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, among others) to the sex side of the Castro. The dildotronics “movement” to the degree it really existed was an SF/Well/Mondo2000 effort.
If anything it was the weirdos who flooded SF starting in the 2000 boom who tried to squash it.
In the 2010s people excised all the gogo dancers and atmosphere models and any woman monetizing her body from tech events, without asking their opinion on anything. Privileging one kind of woman’s thoughts over another.
Many of the performers were very thrilled to be at a specific company's events and were excited to make it an addition to their CV, their contribution mattered. They were not treated as individuals, they were treated only as a symptom of male preference and that their view didn't matter because they didnt have a cognitive heavy trade.
Miami is not going that direction. Its great. Call out these libidoless segregationists.
> Money from subscriptions can be trivial compared with the profits earned by selling custom videos, sexting sessions and other forms of fan interaction that require more concerted engagement than simply posting to a feed.
In fact many subscriptions are free.
When I listen to people make OnlyFans the butt of a joke or otherwise deride its existence or of people “paying for porn, whyyyy”, it really neglects how that platform works and the marketing funnel. and that many people subscribing are not paying to consume content.
It neglects that a large percentage of the revenue is from other content creators supporting each other, or using a subscription to advertise on a more popular person’s page in their comments.
I’m fine normalizing discussions about both the supply side, where meeting someone attractive in person can easily result in a casual and unoffensive discussion about or introduction to their onlyfans, because its quite common.
and I’m fine normalizing discussion about the demand side, where we don't have to pretend its just “maladjusted men that we don't know”, compared to a distribution of everyone.
I wonder if people realize that they are communicating with the new version of a phone sex line. It seems a little dishonest. Before the Internet, people could call the sex lines and talk to people, and it was your imagination. With the Internet, and only fans, all of the media, it seems disingenuous and a little bit like a scam.
Ultimately if users are satisfied and happy, does it even matter if it is fake? The end goal is not to create a real relationship, it is to create a happy fantasy for the buyer.
If they think they have a real relationship with the real woman behind the camera, they are as delusional as the people who tweet at celebrities and think they have a real relationship with them.
Can’t help but think of the guys writing this behind the scenes:
“It may take me a couple of days to really grasp using this platform and answering all my messages but I will get back to each of you! I will also be taking photos to share on the wall for free with some PPVs over the next couple of days. It is ONLY ME on here, so , I'd love some suggestions! PS; I'd like to also know what time is best to come on and not miss you... also, going to try and do some live streams when I get it all figured out!" Richards wrote.
“You see how there’s a space before the exclamation mark?” he said. “Yeah, that’s how 18-year-olds type.” When it comes to sales, Rosero said, those details make all the difference.
…
“An older lady won’t use emojis; she’ll use, like, a semicolon and parentheses for a winky face, when a younger girl will actually use a winky emoji.”
Is it really even a scam? They are hiring someone to pretend to be interested in them, and they are getting someone pretending to be interested in them. If they can't effectively distinguish between the two, where is the scam? Where is the bait and switch?
Is it really all that different than the old phone sex lines? I’m not old enough to know, but I’d presume there’d be some visual accompanying said ads — perhaps a woman more attractive than the real one on the other end of the phone?
These ads were all over the backs of local media rags (Guardian, Stranger, Phoenix). Always had a sexy babe with barely any clothes on. Call me babe, only $4.99/min (in 1999 money!)
I mean, there's also post-internet real phone sex lines with real people.
Obviously NSFW, but for instance niteflirt.com uses internet technology so you can call people, but neither of you learns the others' phone number, privacy is preserved, etc.
How is it disingenuous or a scam? If you are paying to talk to someone, you know there is no real connection. If there was a real connection you wouldn’t have to pay. So clearly you know you are buying something pretend, so where is the scam?
> "You see how there’s a space before the exclamation mark?" he said. "Yeah, that’s how 18-year-olds type."
I have never seen any 18-year-old type like this. Is this actually common in the US or just a thing of older folk imaging how an 18 -year-old might type?
I picked up on this... My initial thought was, typing on a phone, and tapping the auto-complete for the word 'daddy' would automatically insert a space afterwards. It's quicker/easier to just live with the space, than delete it before typing the '!'.
To me, we need a better word given the overlap with all other kinds of managers and platforms.
Just because a woman and her body is involved for attention and payment, anybody getting any payment and involvement is called a pimp?
Where's the coercion, destruction, trafficking? Where are the people that really do lack agency and autonomy?
There should be two different words, one for the destructive thing that's regulated or sanctioned in physical sex for money activities, one for benign management.
The website is taking advantage of the naivety of young women. I would not call it "benign management", just like, for example, I would also not say that online casinos are "benign" just because they are fully legal.
Then it would be more appropriate to say that the website is not a pimp, but a madam.
Naivety seems to imply that what they are doing is wrong, or a mistake, but they don't understand it fully. Don't you think that's a paternalistic view? Do you know what's best for those women?
Clearly the poster thinks they do know what is best, it's just that it's founded on more than paternalistic views: They seem to equate sex work with gambling, which tastes fundamentally puritan.
Having a choice you can make that you need to spend some time really thinking about to understand doesn't mean you have to take that choice away from someone. If you do, you implicitly say that you are better than whoever got to make this choice before and you should be the one making their choices. You are not better and neither is anyone else. People make their own choices, that is the society I want to live in.
A ton of things seem like easy money but aren't for most people. Many of those have a risk of long-term negative consequences. You just described a large part of life.
What makes sex work special compared to say, pilots, police, electricians, miners, fishermen, divers, construction workers and many many others who also need to balance their choice against a very real risk of long-term negative consequences?
I know of some naive people, I know of some cunning people, I know of some extremely high functioning people that have a business plan, I know of some extremely goofy people that don't know what to do with all the money they make, I know of many people with paltry earnings. Many people have multiple of these attributes at once.
I don't think brothel terms are really accurate or necessary. You are mapping due to some overlap of erotica and women. There are so many other intermediaries that can be applied to these terms better, such as the businesses that let people rent rooms to record in, with better lighting and setup than they have at home. But even then, we should use a more applicable word, as they are not brothels with madams or pimps, no matter whether they have great collaborate management, or management issues.
Screw paying a cut to the chatters or even the models for that matter. This entire business model can be automated with a chatbot and a deepfake engine.
GPT-adjacent text prediction AIs are already mostly used for this to great effect. AI Dungeon was mostly used to generate erotica. Its successors like NovelAI and Sudowrite are also used mostly for this. The "chatbot" label isn't imaginative enough, because people use them for everything from autogenerated personalized fiction to simulated chat logs.
I've noticed that there is a huge amount of these models, including many Russians, offering "dick ratings".
I always felt it likely at least some of these are managed by FSB as a way to gain blackmail material on western citizens. I have no evidence that's the case, except that it would be extremely doable and probably very effective.
I know you're only commenting in jest, but in case other people are curious:
The replies she commonly give people are more like "That's a pathetic cock, I'd never want anything to do with it and I'm sure others hate it too 2/10" or "Wow, what a grandiose dick, a master among plebs, 9/10", and anything in-between, depending on what it seems like the person wants to hear.
The times we've talked about it, it seems most people want to be degraded, which seems a bit self-destructive, but I don't know them and won't judge whatever they are into. People be strange!
Yeah, not suggesting the whole practice is a front. But it would surprise me just as much if none of it was either. Seems too golden an opportunity for various bad actors for it not to be exploited. Hell, it even pays for itself.
There's an old KGB trick called "sweet trap" where the target is seduced and filmed having sex (ideally non-conventional sex like bondage, gay, etc.) for blackmail purposes.
It's also a common scam nowadays, only remote and with nudes instead of actual sex.
It would make sense the FSB and colleagues have modernised and also use modern techniques. In fact a few years back a candidate for mayor of Paris (unlikely to win, but would have had ~15-20% of the votes) had a video of him masturbating, IIRC with another guy on video chat, released on Twitter. The guy was a "traditional family" type and resigned from his campaign.
There are more efficient ways to get blackmail material, especially that FSB doesn't care about random citizens. Also if, for some specific reason, they would need to blackmail specific random citizen, they probably would use more mundane ways (like threatening that they will throw you to jail).
is it too utopian to think that there is a threshold where we have all been online long enough to cease viewing eachother's intimate pictures as compromising? imo you don't have to be a nudist to find the prospect of being blackmailed by your own body incredibly strange.
Nude pictures don't qualify as blackmail material? Clearly they do, to some people, as there are numerous cases of nudes being used for extortion.
I doesn't seem far fetched that there could be a significant overlap between men who have enough insecurity about themselves to pay for the service, and men who would be amenable to blackmail using said photos.
Besides, it's not just the photo. Likely other things were shared as well, and the embarassment of having paid for online sexting might be more than enough for some people. Especially if they're married...
I've met someone who claims to make about $600k USD per year by managing the chats of mid-level OnlyFans women. He got his start in Los Angeles, California, where he began to realize the need for his service in the marketplace.
He simply chats all day to lonely men, pretending to be women, so the women don't have to.
Interesting that models of only moderate attractiveness are in the highest demand due to creating a perception of "attainability". The connectivity of the internet makes them, de-facto, the most desired.
OnlyFans in Ancient Rome: The Colosseum Arena is packed with people, everyone is watching the orgy in the center and throwing a a few coins from time to time, the High Priests of this Temple of Lust burn a special scent that drives the crowd crazy.
The personalities described here - like Jason Rosario - don't seem like particularly pleasant people to spend a lot of time with. Their life goals and priorities are not mine. But like most porn, while it might be kinda gross, but it shouldn't be illegal or inherently subject to societal shaming (if Rosario was selling energy drinks, who would judge him the same way?).
The place for real unethical behavior, therefore, is on the margins: Taking unreasonable cuts of models' income (70%!). Negotiating different rates with different subscribers for the same video. What if a subscriber is having a genuine mental health crisis? What if they threaten to kill one of the models? Or themselves? Is Jason Rosario prepared to handle that?
None of those possibilities seem like reasons to just shut all of this down or do anything - not that I'm sure the article is advocating for that. I'm just not sure what else to do or consider in response to this phenomenon. I guess I just acknowledge it exists? I doubt the people in this story could be counted on to behave responsibly, but until they don't, I'm not sure what it matters.