Monthly Archives: August 2021

OnlyFans Backtracks on Its Plans to Ban Porn

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When I first found out that OnlyFans decided to allow pornographical material to continue, yet subscribers are still deciding to jump ship, my first thought was: It’s amazing what happens after everyone decides to jump ship after you make a stupid, horrible decision. This is a lot like that one time I told my billionaire, bikini supermodel astrophysicist girlfriend we should probably see other people. Didn’t go the way I planned.

The point is: OnlyFans has a spotted history as it is, and then once it revealed it was pursuing the dollar in hopes of becoming more mainstream, and then losing practically all of its subscriber base, they retracted, they did pretty much what ever critic of the site has believed was going to happen as a natural stage of evolution. At some point, they were going to stab themselves in the foot and then wonder why it hurts so much to keep on walking.

What’s interesting is that OnlyFans didn’t start out as a site geared around promoting sex workers. It was designed as one of those sites that hoped to attract celebrities who would use it to communicate with their fans. And then a guy who ran a cam girl site bought a controlling interest and then pimped it out to the cam girls who used his site. In a very short amount of time, it became known as a sex-friendly site, and then the pandemic hit. The rest is, well, history.

The site would probably continue to grow (and still might) on the backs of sex workers, but as often happens in this kind of situation, the owners ran afoul of payment processers who refuse to have anything to do with this industry. And thus, the situation that emerges today (after the backlash of starting to realize that its bread and butter was starting to jump ship and those that they wanted to attract still consider the site to be one that is cloaked in porn.

But this isn’t the first time this has happened in the Internet era. Pornhub went through this problem before (and survived) as did, and might even again, Patreon. Similarly, years back, during the early days of the Internet, I was a web designer for an adult bookstore, and the Internet service company they used had been sex positive, as was the manufacturer of the bookstore’s shopping cart. Well, one weekend in the middle of the night, the bookstore owner received an angry communication from the company that made the shopping cart, calling her all sorts of derogatory names and indicating that his company could no longer continue doing business with a purveyor of filth, immediately cutting off all access to the shopping cart. Shortly after that, the web site provider also contacted her and said something similar, stating that their company refused to do business with a porn business. Keep in mind, both of these companies had been profiting from an association with her company for over four years before these announcements and there had never been any concerns in the past. As a matter of fact, they had actually gone through lengths to get her business in the first place.

So, almost overnight, I had to find her a new Internet web site provider and then ran into a wall of companies that couldn’t promise not to take the same action one day concerning hosting her shopping cart. So, I sat down for two weekends and crafted a shopping cart for her from scratch, coding it in PHP.

The point is: She took care of her business regardless of the resistance she encountered because she was both patient and had perseverance. On a slightly amusing front, the two companies (the Internet web site provider and the company that made the shopping cart) both went out of business a few years later due to lack of clientele.

So, that’s kind of where OnlyFans is right now. I’ve been reading very interesting asides from those in the sex worker community who have vowed to move their content to other sites, while a few others seem willing to stick it out. This action by OnlyFans may prove to be a make or break incident, but either way, it should serve as an excellent wake up call for other companies in the future that dare to buck trends. The market corrects, but it doesn’t always correct in a favorable fashion.

Changes to the Page, Blog and Future Projects

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Yesterday, I implemented a number of changes to my site, including the weblog itself. While I tend to do this every now and then just for the sake of keeping things up to date, my reasons this time around were a little more specific: It turned out that the themes and plugins I was using for my site were horrifically out of date, making it impossible to even add new content. Strangely enough, I didn’t notice this until I found myself trying to update the “last date updated” on the front page to realize that the site was no longer giving me specific permissions.

As I’d created my site from scratch back in the day and integrated WordPress to help build a sustainable weblog, I decided to revamp the site, completely changing the theme and then slowly updating specific parts of the web page. As I made each change, I started to discover the incompatibilities with certain segments I updated, so I started removing and replacing content. It’s amazing how over the course of a few years so much technology can change and fundamentally destroy other parts of your content due to older programs not interested in talking to newer ones. Anyway, so if you see a change here and there, it just means that I discovered something needed fixing or updating, and I’m just getting around to addressing it.

As for current projects (that aren’t the web site), I’m currently working on two novels (1991 and a series with the working title of Return to Camelot). I’m also embracing the C# programming language to develop my latest game, which is universe where your actions affect the future course of the universe and the surroundings encompassing that universe. Think of it as Ultima’s avatar, except the avatar doesn’t change; the entire universe changes due to your choices and lifestyle. A better way to think of it is if you decide to be very violent in your behavior towards NPCs, the world starts to become equally violent towards you as a result. It took me some time to figure out how this could be coded, but then it dawned on me that multiple string variables that track your progress would then be coded into an algorithm where based on a scale of 1 to 1000, using different scalable metrics, you’d slowly start to see changes implemented slowly in an evolutionary process where just doing one nice thing for an npc doesn’t mathematically achieve change in background because it takes a lifetime of behavior to influence the larger picture, and people have a tendency to make year end resolutions that don’t translate to actual behavior modification. Anyway, think of it as using mathematics to explain the concept of friendliness; people incapable of understanding such modified behavior will always consider it magic rather than science.

Anyway, just a short update. Hope you’re all doing well. And from the web page metrics, it shows that people are visiting the site, so if you’re one of those people who never comments, please comment because I’d really like to know that what I’m sharing here on a regular basis is actually of interest to anyone who might be following. Like Barry Allen says in Zack Snyder’s Justice League: “I need friends.”

OnlyFans to Block Adult Content

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the adult content site OnlyFans has made a decision to ban future content that is adult in nature. Taken on the surface, this seems like a logical step for a company that is trying to appear more mainstream, but after unpacking this story, it appears there’s a lot going on under the surface, and the results may vary and the owls may not be what they seem.

For those who deal with these types of subjects on the surface only, it seems very straight-forward, but if you listen to the responses from those in the industry, the rhetoric ranges from “the sky is falling” to “this doesn’t change anything from the status quo.” However, there are changes coming, and yes, they are going to affect some people more than others. So, exactly how?

Let’s just put it this way: If you’re already a sex worker content creator with a huge following, the change means very little. Most of the traffic for OnlyFans rarely came through the platform itself; people didn’t find content creators by searching the site (the site was never designed to cater to that process). Instead, sex workers who already had a strong following just advertised they were on OnlyFans and then the people who were already interested in their content went there for an easy process to access more of their material. For those types of creators, there are other services available that not only replace OnlyFans, but they were there long before OnlyFans emerged on the scene. So, those content creators will make do and continue to strive as before.

Where this change makes the largest impact is on the newest demographic: Young women who gravitated towards OnlyFans after the emergence of the pandemic. At first, the large swell of creators joining the platform were mostly adult workers who had very little (or no) Internet presence. As their physical, in person business model was drying up due to the fact that men were not as easy to translate into customers while people were dying from Covid-19, much of their “activity” they would normally charge for could now be converted to virtual interactivity that they could then share for monetary rewards. And what they quickly discovered was that because OnlyFans made it possible to build a lucrative following (as the customers weren’t just someone they met on the street who might never return), they now had repeat customers who could access their content at all times without them having to actually physically maintain proximity to their clients in order to provide services and then get paid.

Because this was both lucrative and quick income, it should not surprise anyone that young women who were probably never planning to become sex workers themselves realized that there could be a lot of money to be made if they, too, hung out their shingle in this marketplace. And almost overnight, starting with strippers and cam girls and then leading to moms and repressed librarians, women were actively engaged in selling promiscuous content to horny guys (well, to anyone, but mostly guys).

The one negative that always seemed to be in the background was the stigma of doing sex work, which for naive reasons young woman seemed to believe might never happen. But as their content was on the Internet, and there is no class amongst the people who subscribe to this type of content, they started to become very surprised when their content became widespread, and future aspirations (and that wasn’t sex work) because almost impossible because of the stigma attached to this occupation. Women, with occupations ranging from doctors to school teachers, lost their jobs when their employers found out they were previously sex workers, even though the women would often try to make the argument that selling pictures of themselves naked was not sex work and then disappointed when such protests fell on deaf ears.

There was a very interesting episode involving Kevin Samuels who confronted a group of OnlyFans girls about how they needed to start banking their money soon because the cash cow of OnlyFans was not going to last forever, and those girls treated him like a moron because this Internet celebrity obviously didn’t understand the business world as well as they did. Well, this announcement from OnlyFans just yesterday indicates that he knew exactly what was going to happen, and one can only imagine how panicked these girls must be right now due to such an announcement.

What makes this somewhat tragic is that such an announcement was inevitable. It happened with Paypal, it happened with Tumblr, and it has happened with so many types of business applications that started out by appealing to the sex worker industry just to get their foot in the door before abandoning that demographic and “going legit”. And as tends to happen with most of these companies, that act of going legit will end up being their downfall because they, too, are tainted by the stigma of being a platform for sex, which is why people will avoid it like the plague if they’re not actually attracting the element that made it famous in the first place. Imagine going to an exclusive club because it always had the hottest women and let those women in free (realizing that was going to bring in customers) and then decided “we’re big enough now that we don’t need to do that” and stopped letting attractive women in for free. So they stopped coming. So would their clientele because the reason they go to those clubs is because of the overabundance of attractive women in the first place. And then the business closes.

This is why nightclubs NEVER do that.

So, it will be interesting to see if OnlyFans goes the direction of Myspace as another company takes its place, or if it somehow morphs itself into something sustainable by hosting celebrities and cooking shows. As for the many women who made their future successes contingent on the platform, hopefully they prepared for this future, already were a sex worker to begin with and can compensate by finding incoming from other revenue streams, or bite the bullet and try to re-enter the workplace environment, hoping beyond all prayers that no one ever finds out about their steamy past. In this digital age, the integration of digital technology has become crucial for success in various industries.

All I know is that I won’t be their lifeline. I’m a lot smarter these days than when I was young and stupid.

Dents in the Man-O-Sphere

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There’s an interesting dynamic going on in the manosphere, which, if you’re not following this kind of content, you’d be very likely to have no idea it’s actually happening. But as I’ve mentioned in previous posts (and a few Youtube podcasts), I’ve been fascinated by this area of information, for both great content and some of the worst media I’ve come across in quite some time.

For those not familiar, the mansophere ranges from men going their own way (MGTOW) to dating strategies to a woman-hating rhetoric that resembles Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes with his “No Girls Allowed” Club. One of the more popular segments of this genre has been the whole “high-quality man” concept, where men purport to be the most valued type of men because they meet extremely unspecific checkmarks on female dating desires (i.e., six figure income, six feet tall, washboard abs, etc.). So, it’s not surprising that there are several podcasts out there where men claim to be exactly what these “high-quality men” are claimed to be. One of them happens to be a podcast called Fresh & Fit (which, if interested, you can find by searching for them on Youtube).

So, as I was researching a lot of this information (as I do with a lot of really strange topics), I started following this Fresh & Fit feed, and to make a long story short, it’s basically two African-American males in their young adulthood ages who sit around a table and ask questions of guests who came on their show. In most podcasts, they will have a large group of young women who all appear to have visited right before heading out to the Miami club scene, and then the two guys will continue to ask them questions about what they seek in men. And as you would expect, as their guests are almost always young (in their early twenties), generally attractive and quite often street stupid, they’ll go through their laundry lists of what a man has to be in order to attract their attention. After a while, you start to just hear their responses as noise because quite often a 19 year old girl who has done absolutely nothing in her life, other than have a somewhat lucrative Only Fans page where she sells her body for quick profit will indicate that a man needs to make at least $300,000 a year to even get her to blink, which basically translates to “hey, here’s a future cat lady who hasn’t bought her first cat yet”, meaning almost all of them are so in dreamy land that doesn’t exist, so that it becomes more comedy than anything else. Some of the men would prefer to go through online sites and check out the Best Platforms for Private Affairs in the UK that can ease their doubt of their self-worth.

But the main point that you finally end up with the Fresh & Fit podcast is that the two guys pretend they are high-value men that women should be fighting themselves over to even have a chance with them. In reality, they come off as desperate beta males, cosplaying as cool dudes, but it’s their schtick, so let’s just leave it at that. However, their approach to their podcast is that they are giving advice to the men out there (dating advice) and helping men to become their better selves. And while sometimes they do just that, most of the time, the podcast serves as a vehicle to allow the main guy of the two (Myron) to insult the women on the show, and women in general while acting like he has all of the answers because he has a podcast. The amount of times they try to raise their clout by talking about how many subscribers they have becomes very tiring and gets very old, almost like telling a potential girlfriend that she should date you because lots of women like you.

Anyway, one of the other podcasts I also watch is called Aba & Preach, and it involves two guys who basically address social topics and give their spin (or approach to them). What makes them unique is that they are very down to earth, really know their stuff, and basically call things as it is without ever turning childish in their approach. After a few years of watching their podcast, I’ve come to the conclusion that you can generally trust what they have to say because their worldly view rarely steers me wrong.

So, fast-forward, or reverse backwards, depending on your observation, Aba & Preach called out Fresh & Fit for some very specific content, pointing out that there were records of Myron actually telling women they had to give up sex if they wanted to be on the show and a bunch of other behaviors that went against the whole narrative of them being alpha males, and especially high-value men. The next day (or it might have been that night), Fresh & Fit did an episode where they acted like children and started making ad hominem attacks on Aba & Preach, and even went out of their way to start talking smack about Preach’s wife, who had nothing to do with the podcast whatsoever. This, in turn, led to a much more introspective criticism by Aba & Preach, which was both powerful and went over extremely well in the Youtube community. At the end of it, due to threats that were made from Fresh & Fit, Preach accepted a dare from the two Youtubers to box, and began to physically prepare to travel to Miami to do exactly that.

I should point out here that if you’ve ever seen Preach, you would not want that guy coming to your city to do any type of harm to you. He’s a big guy, and he has a certain disposition that indicates that he would back up everything he says with an equal amount of force. Myron and FreshPrinceCEO (his partner) seem to put off an air of being all talk, in comparison.

What happened next is kind of the point of this write-up. Fresh & Fit did a podcast the next day where they made a political apology, which if you’re not aware of what that means, they apologized to their subscribers for taking the wrong approach to this altercation. Aba & Preach responded with no intention of accepting the apology, stating, “the apology needs to be as loud as the insults” or something close to that. And they were right because at no time did their “apology” actually appeal to Preach, whose wife had been insulted, amongst other insults centered on Preach’s character, and even on his nationality and heritage. So, Preach has further indicated that he is moving forward with concluding the altercation as Fresh & Fit offered, in person and physically.

Today, FreshPrinceCEO made a podcast where he was buying a gun, kind of an out of the blue podcast that had no connection to any type of content either he or his partner has ever made. As expected, Aba made a statement on Youtube calling out FreshPrinceCEO on horrible optics and timing for such a podcast.

What’s really fascinating about this whole thing has been the response of the viewer base. For the most part, Aba & Preach have been hailed for direct, levelheaded responses and the commentaries have been nothing but positive. The commentaries on Fresh & Fit’s response has been horrible. Just yesterday, they lost 11k subscribers, which if you ask me, was the reason the “apology” was even attempted in the first place. They seem to be hemorrhaging members from their subscribers and while their most diehard followers support them, even on their own podcasts they are receiving all sorts of back and forth, rather than blanket support.

I find this whole thing to be really interesting because for the most part, what happens on the Internet rarely has ramifications, almost as if the realm suffers from the old adage of “any publicity is good publicity” or the opposite which is more of a cancel culture when you’ve upset the status quo and lose everything. The Fresh & Fit podcast seemed to be benefiting from the first axiom without realizing that ramifications can suck, and once they start to emerge, it’s like a slippery slope that doesn’t end until you’re at the very bottom of the hill with no way to get back up again.

So, over the next few weeks it should be interesting to see if they can survive this backlash, because I suspect that they are a lot like Hong Kong declaring war on China without realizing that might not bring the outcomes you want in the end.