The $2 per hour worker behind the OnlyFans boom (bbc.com)
60 points by 1659447091 3 days ago
autoexec 37 minutes ago
How is this not fraud, or at least false advertising? If I'm paying money to chat with a specific sex worker how is it even legal to let some random dude in a third world country pretend to be the person I'm supposed to be talking to? I've never personally engaged in these types of systems, but I don't think there's a problem with them as long as they are run honestly. It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.
mingus88 9 minutes ago
It is fraud. However, one thing has become crystal clear lately is that laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and able to enforce them.
And further, scamming people in the context of sex has always been easy because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.
Imagine filing a report that you spent thousands of dollars chatting with some random person, having the chat logs submitted as evidence, etc. it’s similar to why all types of sexual assault are rarely reported
ghurtado 7 minutes ago
> because of the shame in admitting you fell for it.
I would argue that the reason has more to do with our utter inability to create common sense laws regarding anything "sex".
jzb a minute ago
shrubble 7 minutes ago
This was done by “mail order bride” companies like those in Russia and Ukraine; the phrase is that you are not talking to Anastasia but “Hairy Boris”!
bawolff 20 minutes ago
I wonder to what extent the clients care. Either way its still paying for a fantasy.
V__ 26 minutes ago
There is probably some lingo somewhere clarifying that you pay for the "experience" of her and not for her in particular.
iugtmkbdfil834 31 minutes ago
But then.. how is it any different from Amazon saying automated stores while a human is watching cameras or waymo having humans operate in some circumstances. If there are no rules, you can't expect corporates to govern themselves in a way that does not benefit them..
whynotmaybe 29 minutes ago
Do we know if onlyfan is already training their own models with their user's content?
giantrobot 8 minutes ago
How could they not be? At $2 an hour they'd be leaving money on the table by not paying a tiny fraction of that for an LLM.
thedelanyo 29 minutes ago
That's why China ban this service outright? But hey, America is a democratic and freedom land.
PeterStuer an hour ago
2$ an hour chatter and 20$ an hour 'model', both replaced by AI.
anovikov 3 days ago
Now this is almost entirely automated anyway, there is a big adult ecosystem here in Cyprus and i talk to a lot of people. No manual work is used there anymore, "chatters" are a thing of the past.
Now they are well on the path to automate OnlyFans models themselves, there are plenty of hybrid sites where known live models are attracted with good terms to bring in the users, and then slowly switched for AI ones, and it WORKS.
Adult industry is so competitive and fast-evolving because there are few deep moats, it shows the way for everyone else, in fact.
vimda an hour ago
God that's depressing. Even when you _pay_ for human connection you're being fobbed off onto an AI
PeterStuer an hour ago
Bet you had some really deep human connection with that guy chatting to you from the Philippines.
vimda 29 minutes ago
nine_k 40 minutes ago
To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill.
At OnlyFans you're paying for a video feed, and computers are pretty good at producing convincing video feeds now.
localuser13 a minute ago
cess11 44 minutes ago
What do you mean by "human connection"?
steve_adams_86 34 minutes ago
throwaway5752 38 minutes ago
It's going to kill the software industry as we know it!
We're literally killing our field by making the devices and internet so repulsive that people are actively unplugging. You can't hear about this online because the bot generated content is filling the gap and the people doing it aren't online to tell you about it.
Children are getting addicted to everything because the internet has killed any sense of self-stimulation and they are growing up into gamblers with cards, sports, and prediction markets or rage-addicted media consumers.
There is plenty of human connection to be had out there, it is free, and all you have to do is put down the phone or computer. It is getting extremely compelling as an alternative for increasing large groups of people.
The tech industry is energetically strangling its golden goose.
SoftTalker 20 minutes ago
createaccount99 33 minutes ago
That's pretty smart.
tehjoker 41 minutes ago
Does that mean that people do not recognize that some of the content is AI? Or do they simply accept it?
myhf 31 minutes ago
A little bit of real content goes a long way toward getting people to pay for something unknown, which then turns out to be AI-generated. Even if they are not satisfied, that counts as AI content making a sale.
firtoz 35 minutes ago
There's enough people on both camps I'm sure.
bawolff 30 minutes ago
> She would be set targets to earn the model hundreds of dollars worth of sales of pictures and videos during her shift.
So lets assume $300 per shift, so with an 8 hour shift, that would be about $37.50/hour of merchandise per hour. So the workers makes about 5.3%. Google says standard for sales workers paid on comission normally get 5-10%.
So its possible this is within what would be normal for a low end non-salary commision job, but it depends on what "hundreds" really mean. Of course i think normally for commision only sales jobs you move much more expensive product to make it worth your while.
Otoh they probably deserve a lot higher than normal sales commision given the nature of the job and all the stuff they undoubtedly have to put up with.
chaseadam17 9 minutes ago
Somewhat unrelated but I won’t be surprised if we eventually find out a lot of OnlyFans revenue is money laundering.
Invictus0 a minute ago
Doubtful, there are other, less-well known pay-for-content platforms than take a smaller percentage cut than onlyfans. It wouldn't make any sense for a launderer to use the most expensive platform.
system2 19 minutes ago
I am still amazed that prostitution is legal when done online, and these teenage sex workers are allowed to continue selling themselves.
beejiu 15 minutes ago
(a) It's not prostitution, and (b) while prostitution is illegal in the US it's perfectly legal in the UK and many other countries.
mschuster91 15 minutes ago
Related: in Germany, there currently is a huge scandal surrounding the company "Fanblast", where you could purchase the supposed "whatsapp phone number" of various "celebrities" and, allegedly, the chats were also run by random freelancers [1].
[1] https://www.comicschau.de/news/fanblast-aloa-me-klengan-krit...
Fricken 34 minutes ago
Average wages in the Phillipines are around $360/month USD, so $2/hr isn't too bad for an easy job. BBC is playing rage-bait arbitrage with that headline.
cedarscarlett an hour ago
Let me complain about how I'm being exploited at my job while voluntarily choosing said job over literally every other job available to me.
swiftcoder 43 minutes ago
Please do enumerate these other jobs that are available to the Filipino currently performing this job for... checks notes... $2/hour?
mhb 35 minutes ago
Please say what you think the hourly average wage is in the Philippines and how you conclude that this isn't the woman's best option despite her revealed preference that it is.
swiftcoder 27 minutes ago
mmooss 42 minutes ago
That's how exploitation works: The exploited don't have another choice. That doesn't make doing cruel things to them wrong and (hopefully) illegal.
For example, someone could compel people who are starving to do all sorts of horrible things for food, and then say 'well, they chose to do it!'.
mhb 28 minutes ago
Once you make this job illegal, what do you think she does then for a job? By taking this job she has revealed that this is her best option. When you make the job illegal, you're forcing her to take a worse alternative.
dangus 27 minutes ago
This is true, but I also think that the information in the article alone is insufficient to make a judgment.
This salary is over the Philippines minimum wage. It's a legal job like any other.
The people interviewed are not super happy about the content of the job, but none of it seems to be anything more than it being pornography-related.
Nobody's really seeming to cross any lines of illegality as described in the article. This doesn't come close to the kind of conditions faced by Meta's contractors in Africa spying through Meta glasses in private homes.
I would equate this type of job to any type of job that has aspects that some people would never be willing to do.
E.g., I would never be willing to be a window washer. I'm too scared of heights. Same deal with tower construction. But there are plenty of people doing those jobs who don't feel exploited.
The plus side of jobs like this are that you can do this work at home, you can be physically disabled, there's often some level of flexibility of hours, and there's no manual labor.
I'm going to guess that the only scandal here is that the Philippines is 80% Catholic and possibly more conservative than people in the countries where OnlyFans generates its income.