Pretty wild. I have fairly strong opinions on this subject. Neither of the parties (the girl selling and the guy buying) could ever justify it for me. I don’t think it’s possible to go anywhere lower than this, both mentally and spiritually. You have one party sacrificing their morals while the other sacrifices their dignity. And there is no in between. Wow.

I feel like this should be a far more talked about issue than it is. This article is a decent report and touches on the stupidity of it, but I will never ever cave to the “better life” and “i can buy a playstation” argument. Oh hell no.

These people, especially guys, need serious mental help and guidance because this is not normal.

I agree.

Imagine if dating apps paid you to keep your profile active even if you have no interest in meeting anyone. They pay you $5/month per match with a minimum of 5 messages before ghosting. It keeps lonely men on the platform. For some people, OnlyFans chat is no different.

There should be clear disclosures that there is potential the other account is outsourced to a different person, or a LLM.

I'm having trouble finding it now, but I recall there being a rumor that the Bumble CEO was fired for permitting fake accounts to exist, so that usage appeared high. I think it had to do with allowing virtual phone numbers

EDIT: Wow.... there are a lot people in this thread pushing back on the parent comment suggesting outsourced model chats are immoral, or not an ethical way to make a living.

> Imagine if dating apps paid you to keep your profile active even if you have no interest in meeting anyone. They pay you $5/month per match with a minimum of 5 messages before ghosting. It keeps lonely men on the platform. For some people, OnlyFans chat is no different.

What many dating apps do is very close to this. They encourage fake female accounts to keep men on the platform, and what you are being shown is fake/inactive to a large extent. LLMs are the next step of this, I wouldn't be surprised if there are already tons of them. The dating app business is one of the most scammy businesses that exist.

There are some exceptions to this (mostly specific local apps), but they are far and few between.

This is seriously tame and hardly an affront to anyone’s dignity. (Edit: For clarity these people are typing in a chat app pretending to be someone else not sharing pictures of themselves online.)

I really don’t see the difference between this and being an Actor, social media intern, character at Disneyland, Mall Santa etc. An actual 3 year old may be fooled, but sometimes adults want to play pretend as well.

You don’t think you were actually watching Frodo carry the burden of the one ring did you?

Actors generally don't claim that they are actually the person they are portraying.

Unless I misunderstood the article, models with OnlyFans account often offer the service of personally chatting with their paying fans, and then essentially hire improv actors to do the actual chatting.

That sounds fraudulent to me.

Actors, politicians, etc have paid people to pretend to be themselves on social media for years at this point.

The degree to which Twitter followers or OnlyFans users actually believe they are talking to the real person is debatable, but they definitely prefer to believe the illusion.

I mean maybe you should experience firsthand what it would be like if someone in your family was involved in this? I do think that if you can’t think at least a few steps ahead of my point of view maybe you shouldn’t try and justify it on their behalf?

I am not being hostile by the way, just saying it how it is.

This is not some “I accidentally scraped your car” issue. Real people are making extremely unhealthy choices that lead to a lot of trauma and mental disorders. In the name of money (women) and false pleasure (men).

None of these girls give a flying fuck of who these guys are. And according to this article, how could they?

Uhh, this is a guy or girl pretending to be a hot girl online. That’s some on thing millions of people do everyday for the lulz without being paid for it.

I really don’t see why there would be any mental health issues involved?

I believe they're making an allusion to the commonality of loneliness among many of today's young men. Such loneliness is likely only to be exacerbated by habits that are enabled by this work.

Parasitical relationships are common enough I don’t think such spending represents mental illness anymore than other types of frivolous spending like buying action figures. Rather, people taking things to extremes is a general symptom of mental illness and shows up wherever that’s possible.

I know a Hoarder which may be coloring my perception, but underlying mental health issues show up in many different ways.

Or like psychics and palm readers, or even stage magicians. There doesn't seem to be any coercion involved here, one side is paying for entertainment, and in return they are getting entertainment.

Honestly, good for these women who figured out a legal, safe way to profit from thirsty men, that is so risk-free it doesn't even involve physical proximity to those men. They seem to have cracked the "scaling" problem too, by hiring help. I'm impressed.

> Or like psychics and palm readers

Yes, I agree they are like psychics and palm readers, in that they are mostly emotionally manipulating sad marks for profit (or occasionally just doing harmless entertainment... but often not).

> stage magicians

I've met one person in my entire life who thought magic was real. Granted I try not to hang out with morons, but I have to imagine the percentage is low.

> Would you support your 18 year old child doing onlyfans like you might them working at Disneyland?

I would support them the same way I would support them becoming a stunt actor or performing any other job that comes with significant risks - very hesitantly, while having a conversation about potential downsides and not being super happy about their choice (again, mostly due to risk to themselves), but without thinking that it is inherently some moral crime.

To be clear, this isn’t someone showing nude pictures on only fans. This is a guy or girl typing in a chat pretending to be a female model.

If my 18 kid was pulling in 120k working 6 hours a day like this, I would personally respect the hustle. If nothing else it’s a solid foundation to get a job pretending to be a politician/CEO/actor on social media etc. So there’s both better pay and more upwards mobility than most jobs available at 18.

> Would you support your 18 year old child doing onlyfans like you might them working at Disneyland?

What reason would I have to be less supportive?

The serious potential for emotional and reputational harm resulting from having publicly searchable nude images of them on the internet (assuming they're doing OnlyFans content, not roleplaying someone elses content).

Is the reputational harm any greater than the reputational harm in being openly gay? The 'reputational harm' is that bigots will judge you.

You're overlooking the long history of sex work in most human civilizations. Fair enough if you morally disagree with it and wish it didn't exist but it's existent and the existence of people who provide and consume it is about as normal as it gets.

If you accept that sex work will always exist in some capacity then there are reasonable arguments that the existence of OnlyFans is a good thing, as the OnlyFans model of sex work is in many ways much better than traditional models for both the sex workers and the consumers. There are of course arguments against that too, but saying sex work is fundamentally immoral and thus OnlyFans should be stopped is naive and more importantly unhelpful when it comes to reducing the potential harm sex work can cause.

I wouldn't say that sex work is fundamentally immoral, but using deception to manipulate people into giving you money is hard to defend. Of course this occurs in many other industries, too.

Those are strong opinions! We all await your definition of “normal” to reinforce your principled stance.

They are in fact strong opinions. Normal people don’t take their clothe off to sell images of their vagina to people who are mentally unstable. Not sure how much more principled you want to go about it.

Isn't this the same as what we all do, just more anonymous? Like, you can't pay for housing unless you show up to a place owned by someone with 3 yachts for 40 hours every week. While you're there, you can't listen to music or visit certain websites. If someone coughs on you and you get sick, too bad. You also can't use your brain for things work-related outside of work hours; all of your ideas are owned by the crazy yacht guy! If you want to work for some other yacht owner, then you have to take a day off of work and write code on a whiteboard in just the right way.

All of this seems significantly more degrading than selling a naked picture of yourself. The OnlyFans models are selling their body, but you are selling your mind. That's what really makes you you!

I don't really feel this bad about work, but at the end of the day, I don't consider myself engaged in a pursuit any more noble than selling my time to the highest bidder. I can see how parasocial relationships seem weird, and personally I have zero interest in them, but it's quite a stretch to brand anyone involved with one as "mentally unstable". What if they're stable and they want to spend their money on that instead of a $1500 phone, or a $60,000 truck, or a $200 dinner with their friends? I'm not sure any of us are all that mentally stable. Rather, we get by.

This is an article about ghost writers?

Is this copypasta you have prepared for any article about Onlyfans? because your responses dont seem to be about the profession or friction in the article at all

> Normal people don’t take their clothe off to sell images of their vagina to people who are mentally unstable.

“Normal” in what sense? In the sense of common, that’s true. But lots of careers are uncommon. In the sense of well-adjusted, I have trouble believing that’s true. Do you have some evidence or data or… I guess anything, really?

The problem is that politics very rapidly drives its way into the conversation, and discussions about mental health, what is healthy for society, etc get pushed aside.

This model fundamentally changes the structure of human society, and the trend will likely accelerate, not decelerate, over the coming years. And yet the conversation usually immediately gets divided into the feminist camps and the conservative Christian/Muslim camps.

I also think the trendiness of the phenomenon makes it seem more widespread than it is, however I've noticed a scary trend in the younger generation of general unsuitability to healthy relationships, and I just recently learned that a friend has an OnlyFans, so the phenomenon is becoming more widespread.

I'm dating a younger male right now, and "general unsuitability to healthy relationships" really rings true to an extent. His friends are more or less constantly bragging about how they "link up" with their friend's partners (without the friend knowing/consenting), lead people on, and so on. It's obviously not all younger people. I think that the rise of social media has affected this area of human interaction more than other areas, perhaps. The concepts of boundaries and respect are shifting. I think what is considered a "healthy relationship" is likely undergoing a significant shift. Maybe in a generation or two the "healthy relationships" will all be polyamorous ones, and monogamy will be considered the strange/unhealthy kind.

I think it’s highly possible, even likely. But as a society it will be a struggle to adapt to these sorts of fundamental shift of assumptions of how things are “supposed to be.”

Isn’t the substance of politics exactly those discussions though? The reason there are camps is that there is a set of shared views on some issues. Whether along religious lines or otherwise.

It doesn't necessarily split between feminists and conservatives, it is just as likely that feminists split.

In particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin was opposed to pornography in a way that resonated with conservatives.

> because this is not normal.

Have you thought that this actually could be normal, and that we the "wholesome" people are the outlier? That's what worries me :-)

It's predatory, really. The people paying for this are desperate for a relationship of some sort. The people selling are basically taking advantage of someone by what amounts to fraud.

Lower is the AI girlfriend, which I'm wondering why this hasn't already taken off for these types of chat scenarios.

Eh, if you acknowledge that person A and person B can have different morals, your argument doesn’t hold up.

Interesting that you have such a strong opinion about something you apparently don't care for.

I'm happy to tell you that i'm absolutly normal and have a high morals and ethics.

There are people in our society who do not think that Sex, Erotic and the body are disgusting or weird or sick but something great.

Apprechiating this through OnlyFans allows the person who provides the service to do so with their rules and the person who consumes it to feel enjoyment.

I, for example like certain things. The girls/woman there provide it freely and get money for it.

I think you are the problem, not OnlyFans, not me and not the girl taking the money.

And as a site note: We as a society decided to allow every person to take part in our society even weird people, arrogant people, assholes etc. by paying for services. Like the person who MAKES you a Coffee for money.

I actually think (i'm not trolling) that this is sick. Us using others to do things we can do ourselves just because we have the money to do so.

If we wouldn't think its normal, the pressure for society to make people actually free through automisation would be much stronger. But no People need to work, what would happen otherwise if richer person couldn't get a service for convinience...

very odd comment, and from a brand new account. Makes me wonder what your motivations are.

You didn't address anything in the parent comment. You seem to be responding to onlyfans in general, not the fraudulent usage of the chat feature the parent comment is addressing.

Whats odd about it?

Do you think its normal in our society to state publicly that you think onlyfans is okay/good?

Of course not. We are not a open society.

And he clearly doesn't reference the article with the hook 'problem', he keeps it generic: "(the girl selling and the guy buying)"

Onlyfans is obvously satisfying a fantasy. This has very little to do with real life.

And when you actually buy a private video, its not some dude pretending to chat in the name of the woman, its the woman making that video.

> And he clearly doesn't reference the article with the hook 'problem', he keeps it generic: "(the girl selling and the guy buying)"

They are clearly responding to the article, which is about fraudulent use of the chat feature to extract money from men. It's not about selling pictures or videos.

You seem to be taking all of this as a personal attack on your choice of entertainment, or to create division in the thread.

> They are clearly responding to the article

FWIW, OP posted a comment on a message board for said article. Per my reading, they seem to be talking generally about sex work rather than the specific sex-work-fraud as mentioned in the article. Surely the comment is at least vague enough that it could be taken either way.

I honestly don't think your opinions are strong. The vast majority of people intuitively feel this way, they wouldn't willingly date a former prostitute or porn star, they'd be upset if their spouse or child were involved, etc.

It's more of an interesting disaster to watch from a distance, like a car crash.

However, the criteria for mental illness isn't "it's unpopular".

That primarily depends on whether you consider things like attachment disorders to be mental illnesses.

So, more of a nomenclature thing than anything else. Like most Internet debates.

I wonder if society should step in to prevent those men from getting hooked. We already step in to prevent people getting hooked on physical drugs because the negative externalities are too bad to accept. But this sounds like people getting hooked mentally will also have pretty bad side-effects for society as a whole.

I mean imagine some guy "falling in love" with a model this way. And then after a year and $10k in "voluntary gifts", the poor guy figures out that he's the sucker and he has been milked by scammers and he never actually talked to his "girlfriend". Do you expect that person to go back and have a healthy relationship with women afterwards? Or is he going to go off the deep end and become misogynistic? You can't put all the blame only on him after that experience. He might need therapy and rehab afterwards, just like a recovering drug addict.

> I wonder if society should step in to prevent those men from getting hooked.

Clear disclosure and consent is required.

If the person paying for this feature knew it was just roleplay with a person pretending to be the model, I don't think any reasonable person would have an issue with it.

Few people would pay for that though, which is why it's not disclosed. This entire "business model" is based on deception. That it: it's fraud.

As precedent, prostitution is already illegal in most countries. This is controversial, though.

If we want to tackle societal harms then perhaps gambling is a better starting point?

I also think the idea that society steps in to prevent people getting hooked on drugs is hilariously naive.

$500/day will buy a lot of LLM time.

The preferred nomenclature is Big, Beautiful Language Model

I've seen discussions on github repos discussing the same.

eventually AI models will disrupt this, then I have no idea what happens next

They're certainly using the current period of human-produced responses as training data.

Digital avatars powered by LLMs will be better at this

I think people focus on replicating existing people too much

Completely new personalities and voices are going to be even more broadly accepted, as there is a huge audience that feels like paying a real woman is failure, but I suspect will treat this like buying a hentai manga, since that scene has had Adults Only games and other forms of digital interactive entertainment for 20+ years

I also think these completely fictional creators have a monopoly that hasnt been explored well. Because there is no human to potentially be trafficked, websites wont be worried about taking these content creator’s profiles down. While human sex workers will continue getting banned under SESTA/FOSTA liability that site owners endure.

"Microsoft Asia-Pacific developed the AI Xiaoice, which appears as a flirty 18-year-old girl and has garnered hundreds of million users, mostly Chinese men."

https://time.com/6257790/ai-chatbots-love/

> “He believed he was in a relationship with the model. He sent her money to buy dresses and encouraged her to continue posting photos. I don’t know if they’re still together,” she jokes.

Emotionally manipulating someone to send money. Hilarious. I just can't stop laughing.

OnlyFans is an abusive platform. It's not "just" nodes and porn, it sells "connections", except they're not really connections at all, and then abuses that to make money. It's just like the old "form a connection, then ask for money"-scam that's been around for ages.

See my write-up of a few years ago: https://tildes.net/~tech/y52/onlyfans_will_prohibit_content_...

There is a parallel issue in the world of sugar relationships. I know a few "sugar daddies," and one common theme for all of them is the number of "sugar babies" who lead them on and emotionally manipulate them. It's sad that the SDs fall for it, and it's cruel and pathetic that the SBs do it. It's common enough that there's a sort of meme in the gay twink community about it, even.

Yeah I do too, and they related similar experiences. The SB's typically have 3-4 men on the go at any one time.

The sugar baby/sugar daddy dynamic is entirely transactional. Why would the older person think the younger person is actually attracted to them?

You’d be surprised at how many younger people there are who are legitimately attracted to older people. Aside from that, the “purely transactional” nature of these relationships is more nuanced than you suggest.

Real SDs fuck. Anything else and you’re a simp/chump/sucker. Crass but true.

It's not always about sex. One of my friends just wants companionship from younger people. In many ways, the "daddies" like him are the most victimized by these fraud "babies". It's sad, and I just wish he had a more healthy sense of his own self-worth. It's a lot like the stereotypical attractive girl always going after the "bad guy" and wondering why their love life is a constant shitshow.

They are selling exactly the connection the user is buying. A virtual service is being sold and a recipient is using it. This is not the same level tricking someone to give you money on the internet with a sob email. This is a legitimate business transaction for all parties involved.

Except it's not a real connection. Except it's some guy in the Philippines and it's literally lying through their teeth about who you're forming your "connection" with. Except many regular people spend huge amount of money they wouldn't otherwise spend.

It's the exploitation of (mostly male) loneliness.

"Its not a real connection" - and if its not, so what? Why we should decide what connection is real and what is not? Why its matter?

I mean, why we should decide for someone who use it? What wrong with allowing it?

It does seem sad that men resort to these services in a way that likely harms them. Does anyone have any statistics that breaks down content-creator income by user spendage? A priori my assumption is that (as I understand it) similarly to the liquor and gambling industry most of the income probably comes from "whale"-like users who spend unhealthy amounts of time and money on the service in a deeply unhealthy way.

A common spin is that the consumers are just having fun, but I imagine the stats tell a rather more depressing story.

It must be exhausting keeping up with the context and who's who from day to day. Assuming they handle a ton of convos at the same time.

Right?! A real skill!

On the internet nobody knows your a dog

Every generation has their moral panic. This is just the latest.

Deceiving someone is fraud, certainly. But the website makes no pretense that it's a dating site. People go there to simulate emotions. No different from how I go to the movies to simulate risky adventures, or others go to a church to feel what I do at an Arsenal game.

Saying "X is bad because Y" is not a "panic". You can disagree with that, but that doesn't make it a "panic".

And it is different because everyone understands what a movie or football game is and there is no faux-personal connection or pretence of one, whereas these types of things are much more murky, never mind the outright fraud of "you're talking to someone other than you think".

To reiterate, non-participatory deception is fraud. But participatory deception isn't. When I go watch a movie, I choose to believe that there is this magician who would kill clones of himself to be the best magician alive. They're "lying" to me. What was on screen never happened. They're depicting a fictional scene. But that's what I'm going there for. The deception. So their giving it to me isn't some sort of crime.

And of course just saying "X is Y" is not a panic. It's the fact that it's quite wildly popular and very normative to say "X is Y" and to gasp and clutch one's pearls as one does so that makes it a moral panic. I'm sure history will judge me well.

I don't know the exact definition but certainly associate "moral panic" with something that may or may not have ever existed or never existed to any meaningful extent.

i.e. Did anyone ever actually put a razor blade in an apple on Halloween? Because I suspect that happened approximately never and yet our parents were cutting them open to be safe.

This, on the other hand, is definitely real and documented.

No, that's an "urban myth". Here is an article which describes some of the past https://www.usi.edu/news/releases/2017/02/rock-n-roll-and-mo...

> One of the moral panics associated with the first wave of rock 'n' roll was the fear of race mixing - that young black and white kids would get together over this music that had a rhythmic, primitive, sensuous beat.

I have no doubt that young black and white kids got together to the sound of the beat. I'm sure you can find some documented real cases of people of different races falling in love over their shared love of rock 'n' roll.

There are worse ways to make money.

Not a bad side gig. I forwarded this to some of my less-than-employed friends.

Beats driving uber-eats and other shitty gig jobs IMO.

For the completely unethical, perhaps.

Delivering food is a legitimate, respectable and productive job. Fraudulently deceiving lonely men to coerce them into paying for more fraudulent interactions, less so.

I wonder how long before an article is published about someone committing suicide when they find out they were talking to a man in the Philippines rather than the woman they thought they were talking to.

People manipulating and pretending to be someone they are not has been going on since the internet has been a thing and provided the ability to be anon. "Nobody knows you are a dog on the internet" is like 1996.

And theft murder has been a thing for as long as there have been people, as have all sorts of bad things. So what? We can just do anything?

I have rarely seen such heartless victim blaming on hackernews...

It does seem morally gray, but I was just amazed by how one of those workers makes better money than in his last job as a web developer in the Philippines.

I'm sure they aren't all clearing $500 a day, but that's what... the equivalent of a $130k/year salary? That's better than a lot of US-based web developer roles, let alone in the rest of the world.

Only requires a bit of creative thinking and being morally bankrupt to be good at something like this.

Cool where do I sign up, hun? I could do this on the side, teehee.

i've been considering training some kind of LLM for this job. it's a fun business.. i got started in it with chatbots on AOL.

I'm sure only fans has the upper hand in terms of training data.

Yeah competing with imaginary incumbents is for suckers!