OnlyFans gives women the chance to earn money by making porn. Sex traffickers also use the platform to abuse and exploit them, say police and prosecutors. The accused range from social media influencers to cash-hungry boyfriends. “I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed,” said one victim.
On an August morning in 2022, a young woman slipped out of a house in suburban Wisconsin and dashed to a waiting police car. Her hands shaking, she told officers it was the “most brave thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
For nearly two years, her boyfriend had held her captive, prosecutors say. She feared he’d kill her if she tried to leave. But just days earlier, after he’d poured hot grease down her back, she started plotting her escape, secretly messaging family and friends to alert police.
The young woman later explained her desperation to detectives: Almost every night, her boyfriend had forced her to record sex acts on camera to sell online. Among his chosen outlets was OnlyFans, the hugely successful website famous for porn.
Video streaming is not cheap. Petabytes and petabytes of data transferred, stored, streaming, networked, etc., etc. YouTube is already barely profitable and only from pissing off their audience and streamers.
A comparison to Patreon isn’t fair at all because they have almost no infrastructure to speak of. What do they actually do? Host a web site with some forum software on it? Handle subscriptions and emails, with a light bit of payment handling? Really?
Oh no the corporations can’t afford to host! Guess we will have to create the tools to self host our own shit then.
Meanwhile, in the real world, creators just want to setup an account and sell their content. Not having to deal with payment processors, setting up cdns port handling customer support themselves.
There’s enough to complain about how OnlyFans impacts society (like creating fake interactions with customers who think they’re interacting with the real deal). But them wanting a cut for doing all the technical middleman stuff is actually reasonable.
Have you seen PeerTube? It’s a good attempt, but even with the P2P-style sharing, they are experiencing 100x the problems that Lemmy has here because of the sheer amount of bandwidth and storage they have to deal with from a tiny micro-fraction of a percentage of the content that YouTube or OnlyFans serves.
Right now, large corporations are the only ones with the resources to even attempt such a thing, unfortunately.